On home ground

I.M. Pei arrives late for the opening of his Suzhou Museum, just as the sun begins to slip down the sky, throwing a soft golden light over the city that was once among the most cultured in the world. Through the white chemical haze that stains the air, rays also fall on a collection of white and grey, geometrical, two-storey buildings that lie next to the Ming-dynasty Garden of the Humble Administrator, fitting smoothly into the city's low-rise architecture.

Yet the scene inside the architect's latest project is anything but serene. Accompanied by Culture Minister Sun Jiazheng, Pei, 89, enters his building through the museum's iron sliding doors, which are decorated with a giant, moon-like metal circle, and is instantly engulfed by paparazzi, well-wishers and officials. Photographers jostle to snap this small, slightly stooped man with black hair and liver-spotted skin, who is dressed in an elegant black suit and his trademark, owlish, round glasses.

Musicians playing traditional stringed instruments struggle to be heard above the din as the mob surges through the outer courtyard, its two pine trees standing as elegantly as in a classical Chinese painting, and into the central foyer. Five years in the making, Ieoh Ming Pei's home town museum may well be his last project and a sense of the uniqueness of the moment lends it an edge of hysteria.

Pei was born in Guangzhou and raised in Hong Kong and Shanghai before emigrating to the US to study in 1935, but he sees Suzhou, about 100km west of Shanghai, as his ancestral home - and the city is determined to welcome back the prodigal son in style. Everyone from pedicab drivers to waitresses knows about Bei Lao, or Old Pei, the famous New York architect, and is aware his new museum is opening on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival. 'Not bad!' or, 'Good stuff!' or, 'He's from Suzhou!' they murmur approvingly.

Born on April 26, 1917, Pei is one of the world's most successful architects. 'Ieoh Ming Pei has given this century some of its most beautiful interior spaces and exterior forms,' the jury of the Pritzker Prize, architecture's top accolade, said in 1983. Among his major achievements are the controversial Louvre pyramid, the East Wing of Washington's National Gallery of Art, Hong Kong's Bank of China Tower and the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, near Boston, in the US.

Although he seems ebullient as he chats at the opening with old friends - such as Paris-based ink-and-brush master Zhao Wuji and photographer Marc Riboud, who have flown in for the occasion, along with dozens of close friends from New York and the French capital - Pei's health needs watching. Just the day before, he skipped a meeting with reporters and went to hospital with mild bronchitis, says his niece and PR consultant, Roberta Pei. 'As you can see I can't be standing for a long time,' he will explain later, seated on a sofa during the opening gala dinner of the refurbished Mandarin Oriental hotel in Hong Kong, where he 'came to see one of my dear friends. At my age, many of them are no longer around.' (Over the years, Pei has been a regular guest at the Mandarin and has even appeared in an advertising campaign for the hotel.)

The guiding principles behind Pei's second-ever China project - the first, the 1982 Fragrant Hills Hotel in Beijing, was decades ahead of its time and met with disappointment - were simple, according to his close friend, Hong Kong-born James C.Y. Watt, head of Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and whom Pei sends in his place to meet reporters. They draw directly from classical Suzhou garden architecture, a tradition of such exquisite beauty that the Ming-dynasty Suzhou gardens are now Unesco World Heritage sites.