The University serves Virginia, the nation, and the world by preparing responsible citizen-leaders; advancing, preserving, and disseminating knowledge; and providing world-class patient care.
All gifts of any kind help secure the University’s place as a premier institution of learning and make it possible for our students, faculty, and researchers to shape a brighter future.
You can give to all 12 schools across Grounds. The possibilities are endless for supporting our students, faculty, and programs. Together, we will find the way forward.
You can join the growing number of alumni and friends who invest now in the University’s future by including UVA as a beneficiary of their wills, charitable trusts, and retirement plans. Gifts like these can offer you and your family significant tax benefits as well as greater financial flexibility in meeting your personal and philanthropic goals.
The Honor the Future campaign, the largest in University history, concluded in 2025, thanks to thousands of loyal supporters. Its impact on students, faculty, facilities, and research reaches across Charlottesville, Wise County, and Northern Virginia as it continues to advance the school in its third century of service to the commonwealth, nation, and world.
“How often the trajectory of our lives is decided by chance,” wrote Lestine Rebecca “Tess” Johnston (Ed ’61, Col ’63) in her 2010 memoir “Permanently Temporary.” Johnston grew up in Charlottesville but would spend the majority of her life in Europe and Asia. She served in the U.S. Foreign Service for 33 years in Düsseldorf, East Berlin, West Berlin, New Delhi, Tehran, and Paris. During the height of the Vietnam War, she lived in South Vietnam serving the U.S. Agency for International Development. She also lived in Shanghai over a 35-year period, including working for the U.S. Consulate in various assignments over 15 years.
Johnston’s recollections as a 22-year-old during her first posting in 1953 war-ravaged Berlin and her travels in the environs reveal her as a keen observer of architecture in every city she visited. In Berlin, she found “not a city, only its remnants” but was still able to provide detailed descriptions of the exquisitely designed and constructed buildings—and also extol their beauty. Importantly, for her career and her cultivation of a lifelong passion for exploration and adventure, she attributed that time in Berlin to her shift from her life as a small-town Southern girl into a more cultured woman.
When Johnston returned from Germany, she enrolled at UVA to study architecture, but women were not admitted to the school at that time. She changed course, as she would do many times in her 93 years, and chose to earn her bachelor’s degree in education and then a master’s degree in German, a language that she’d found an immediate necessity in her first U.S. Foreign Service posting.
But her interest in architecture never waned, and when she arrived in Shanghai in 1981 to work at the U.S. Consulate—just two years after the establishment of U.S.-China diplomatic relations and only one year after the U.S. Consulate opened—the city became her primary place of work and study.
“I had never seen anything like Shanghai in 1981,” Johnston said of the city when she first arrived. “I had never been to a foreign country that looked so utterly and completely Western. It was perfectly preserved, a cross between Warsaw in 1938 and Calcutta, a totally Western city with an Asian population. It was a scruffy showcase of Western architecture—and it was absolutely wonderful.”
Johnston would spend over 30 years immersed in Shanghai: involved in its diplomatic relations and an avid student of its history, culture, and distinctive architecture.
Through a generous bequest to the University, Johnston also ensured that no other aspiring students, regardless of gender, would be prevented from pursuing their interest in architectural studies by creating the Tess Johnston Scholarship in Architecture. Her gift also furthers the study of Asian architecture at UVA by supporting the William Stone Weedon Professorship in Asian Architecture, established in 2003 and currently held by Shiqiao Li.
Li has run the Architecture School’s China Program with his colleague and wife, Esther Lorenz, since he joined the University in 2012, and he knew Johnston personally. Johnston gave tours of Shanghai and shared her expertise on the architecture that so captivated her, and on at least one occasion hosted a UVA student group in her small apartment. Other student groups from UVA also benefitted from her expertise when they visited Shanghai and its UVA China Office, located in an old heritage building in the heart of the former French Concession.
“Tess Johnston was such a treasure for Shanghai. She inspired generations of historians of Shanghai architecture in universities,” said Li. “She was really a moral compass for historical preservation in Shanghai.”
Examples of eclectic Shanghai architecture. Left to right: The Peace Hotel, Wukang Mansion in the former French Concession, and the Consulate-General of the Russian Federation.
Shanghai has a unique architectural legacy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, large portions of the city were leased to the French and British governments, which created two distinct “concession” areas that operated under European urban planning principles and building regulations: the French Concession and the British area, which was later joined by the American government and became known as the International Settlement.
“These two areas had lot of architectural pieces that were built in the late 19th century and early 20th century,” explained Li. “Architects came from all over the world, commissioning, paying for, and designing buildings. Shanghai is almost like a museum of styles.”
Tess Johnston was acutely aware of this unusual landscape and of its potential disappearance in a political and cultural climate that largely dismissed these buildings as bourgeois relics: decadent, beauty-driven projects that didn’t fit the ideology of the time. She sought out these buildings and researched their history, often connecting with their decades-past occupants, and pioneered the study of the Western presence in old Shanghai (1842-1949).
Even the most dilapidated buildings interested her.
“You only had to look beyond their pitted and peeling outer shells to see the bones of the beautiful, waiting to emerge again into the light of a new day,” she wrote. “After 1949, it appeared that no one had enough interest in them to write about them. I was in the right place at the right time, so why not?”
It would take Johnston over a decade to set herself on the path of publishing her first book on the subject. In the meantime, she became intimately acquainted with the city and its culture, and she collected antiques with an almost unparalleled passion. (When she finally moved back to Washington, D.C., in 2016, she sold 13,000 pounds of antiques.)
Johnston left Shanghai for a posting in Paris in 1986 but returned in 1989. It was then that she connected with photographer Er Dongqiang (also known as Deke Erh), and the two would collaborate on 25 books, starting with their 1993 monograph “A Last Look: Western Architecture in Old Shanghai,” the first visual documentation of the city’s architectural legacy.
Tess Johnston (center), Patrick Cranley, and Tina Kanagaratnam and members of Johnston’s final “Tess Walk” in Shanghai before she moved back to the United States in 2016. Photo: Historic Shanghai
In addition to her many publications, Johnston co-founded the organization Historic Shanghai in 1998 with Patrick Cranley and Tina Kanagaratnam with the goal of preserving Shanghai’s history by raising awareness and appreciation of the city’s remarkable built heritage and social and cultural history. Johnston was famous for her walking tours of the city—lovingly known as “Tess Walks.”
Li recalled the atmosphere of destruction and neglect and the growing unfamiliarity with the historical significance of the buildings that made up much of Shanghai before Tess and Er Dongqiang helped once again illuminate the city’s history.
“People didn’t know what the buildings were anymore,” he said. “But Tess Johnston knew. It’s impossible to overestimate her impact for architecture and for UVA.”
