Peking’s Great Francophone Salon Retreat

Posted: March 10th, 2026 | No Comments »

Royal Asiatic Society Beijing – Sunday March 15 – Author Paul French will lead an excursion to Bussiere’s Garden, a hillside retreat in western Beijing where French doctor Jean Jerome Augustin Bussiere lived for three decades. Please sign up at Please sign up at https://rasbj.org/

Bussière Garden/Jardin Bussière, north of Sujiaguo into the Western Hills outside Peking, is a villa and watchtower retreat built by Jean-Augustin Bussière, a French doctor who came to China in 1913. Bussière was the French Legation doctor who also treated private patients such as Yuan Shi-kai and Gladys Nina Werner (the wife of ETC Werner and mother of Pamela Werner), was a trustee and President of Aurora College in Shanghai, involved with Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) and, much later, active in the anti-Japanese resistance.

His expansive Western Hills retreat was also the greatest salon in Peking for French speakers. Weekends saw visits from the likes of key French luminaries in Peking – the diplomat Alexis Leger, aka the poet Saint John Perse (Anabase etc), Andre D’Hormon, Sinologist and translator of Le Rêve dans le pavillon rouge and diplomat and art collectorJean-Pierre Dubosc.

Other occasional (and French speaking) Peking “Foreign Colony” guests included the famous Peking/Paris art dealer CT Loo (Jean-Pierre Dubosc’s father-in-law), the English former diplomat and Sinologist ETC Werner, and diplomat and tutor to Puyi, the Scotsman Reginald Johnston (who had his own weekend retreat, Cherry Glen, near by).

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