After the teachers and students arrived in Kunming, Yunnan Province, they mainly rented houses and attended classes in local middle schools and halls because there were no school buildings. In order to resume normal teaching, most of the funds are used to buy books and equipment. After Liang Sicheng and Lin Laikun, the chairman asked them to design the school building for the conference. The two accepted their order with pleasure, and a month later, a first-class modern university jumped to the page. However, it is impossible for the school to build a school building according to this standard, and this beautiful design scheme was immediately rejected. In the following two months, Liang Sicheng changed his draft several times, and the design scheme was changed again and again: the high-rise became a low-rise, the low-rise became a bungalow, and the brick wall became an earth wall.
When Liang Sicheng and his wife finished the revision of the final draft, Huang Yusheng, then the director of the conference construction, was still very helpless. He said, "Except for the blue tiles on the roof of the library, the classrooms and laboratories can use iron sheets, and the roofs of other buildings should be covered with thatch, and the bricks and wood should be reduced by half. Please make another adjustment. " Angry Liang Sicheng couldn't bear it. He rushed into the principal's office and slammed the design in front of Mei Yiqi. "Change! Change! Change! How do you want me to change it? A thatched cottage? Every farmer can build it. What do you want me to do? " Mei Yiqi, who was wronged, put away the scattered drawings one by one and said apologetically, "Sicheng, please forgive our generosity again." Liang Sicheng took the drawings and choked: "Do you know how much wood farmers need to build a thatched house? The wood you gave is not enough to build a standard thatched cottage! " Mei Yiqi choked back tears and said in a trembling voice, "Sicheng, when you return to Peiping after the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, I will definitely ask you to build a world-class Tsinghua campus. I will give it back to you ... OK?" Half a year later, a thatched school building covered the campus of National Southwest Associated University.
Speaking of President Mei Yiqi himself, his position in the government can be equal to that of the Prime Minister, but he sold his car and fired his driver. In order to set up a student service agency that contracted projects and projects to earn extra money to subsidize the poor life of teachers, he almost sold all the valuable things at home. After 1940, Mei often can't even drink green vegetable soup, and occasionally eating spinach tofu soup is like a holiday. In order to invite Mrs. Mei, the chairman of Yunnan Province, she sold all her remaining jewelry. Later, I had to set up stalls to sell rice cakes to support my family. Once it rained heavily, the headmaster's wife, a rice cake seller, was drenched. Mei Yiqi picked up the basket and scooped the soaked rice cakes into the bowl. While eating, I wiped my tears: "Yonghua, I'm sorry."
This is the "congress spirit" during the Anti-Japanese War. It was in these thatched cottages that the conference produced two Nobel Prize winners, namely, Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao, five winners of the "National Highest Science and Technology Award" by Huang Kun, Liu Dongsheng, Ye Duzheng, Wu Zhengyi and Zheng Zhemin, and eight winners of the "Two Bombs and One Satellite" Meritorious Medal by Zhao Jiuzhang, Guo Yonghuai, Chen Fangyun, Tu Shoukai and Yang Jiayu.