Location from remembrance-of-earths-past by
A small wooden house on a flat reedy lake outside a Chinese provincial city — the retired Tsinghua professor's chosen final home, where Ye Wenjie meets Luo Ji at her daughter's grave and gives him the axioms that doom two civilizations.
The house is silent in a way that has nothing to do with the lake. Ye Wenjie chose it because no one important would ever visit; for a brief period in the Crisis Era this becomes a strategic error, as Luo Ji, then Da Shi, then half the Planetary Defense Council pass through her sitting-room. The tea is always already poured. The reeds bend in any breeze. At night the cold seeps up through the floorboards. Yang Dong's grave is a short walk along the shore.
A modest one-story wooden house with a tile roof and a low covered porch facing the lake. Inside, two rooms: a small kitchen with a coal stove, and a sitting-room with a low table, a worn rug, a glass-fronted bookcase of Chinese astrophysics journals from the 1970s. The lake outside is gray and shallow, fringed with brown reeds. The whole property smells of smoke and dried lotus.