

Quite an inspirational environment for an architectural student! It was a great move because the National School for Architecture was based in an old stable building in the Palace of Versailles. I was drawn to the romance of Paris and I’d been learning French in tandem with my architectural studies. I completed my undergraduate studies in architecture in China before pursuing a master’s degree in Paris, France. The office would have construction models on display, and they would draw the renderings by hand, which fascinated me. I became interested in architecture when I was in primary school because every day after school I would go to my mother’s office to wait for her to finish. My father worked in chemical engineering and my mother was a mechanical engineer.

It’s like a ‘little Mongolia’, with a large Mongolian population. When I was a child I lived in a small town called Hohhot, to the west of China, close to the border with Mongolia.
