Chinese architecture
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- China
- architecture
- feng shui
- pavilion concept
Chinese architecture, the built structures of China, specifically those found in the 18 historical provinces of China that are bounded by the Tibetan Highlands on the west, the Gobi to the north, and Myanmar (Burma), Laos, and Vietnam to the southwest.
The first communities that can be identified culturally as Chinese were settled chiefly in the basin of the Huang He (Yellow River). Gradually they spread out, influencing other tribal cultures until, by the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce), most of China was dominated by the culture that had been formed in the cradle of northern Chinese civilization. Over this area there slowly spread a common written language, a common belief in the power of heaven and the ancestral spirits to influence the living, and a common emphasis on the importance of ceremony and sacrifice to achieve harmony among heaven, nature, and humankind. These beliefs were to have a great influence on the character of Chinese art and architecture. (For the history of the region, see China.)
The elements of traditional Chinese architecture
Because the Chinese built chiefly in timber, which is vulnerable to moisture, fire, insects, and the ravages of time, very little ancient architecture has survived. The oldest datable timber building is the small main hall of the Nanchan Temple, on Mount Wutai in Shanxi province, built sometime before 782 ce and restored in that year. Brick and stone are used for defensive walls, the arch for gates and bridges, and the vault for tombs. Only rarely has the corbeled dome (in which each successive course projects inward from the course below it) been used for temples and tombs. Single-story architecture predominates throughout northern and much of eastern China, although multistory buildings constructed around a central earthen mound (qiu) date to the late Zhou dynasty (1046–256 bce).
The basic elements in a Chinese timber building are the platform of pounded earth faced with stone or tile on which the building stands; the post-and-lintel frame (vertical posts topped by horizontal tie beams); the roof-supporting brackets and truss; and the tiled roof itself. The walls between the posts, or columns, are not load-bearing, and the intercolumnar bays (odd-numbered along the front of the building) may be filled by doors (usually doubled in larger, institutional buildings) or by brick or material such as bamboo wattle faced with plaster, or the outermost bays may be left open to create peristyles. Typically, the intercolumnar filler of bricks or plaster leaves the structural wood exposed in a half-timber manner, turning function into visible geometry. The flexible triangular truss is placed transverse to the front side of the building and defines a gable-type roof by means of a stepped-up series of elevated tie beams (tailiang, “terraced beams,” for which this entire system of architecture is named; also known as liangzhu, or “beams-and-columns”); the gable-end beams are sequentially shortened and alternate with vertical struts that bear the roof purlins and the main roof beam. The flexible proportions of the gable-end framework of struts and beams, vertical rise and horizontal span, permits the roof to take any profile desired, typically a low and rather straight silhouette in northern China before the Song dynasty (960–1279) and increasingly elevated and concave in the Song, Yuan (1206–1368), Ming (1368–1644), and Qing (1644–1911/12). The gable-end framework is typically moved inward in a prominent building and partially masked in a hip-and-gable (or half-hip) roof and completely masked in a full-hipped roof. The timber building is limited in depth by the span of the truss, with the weight of the roof growing three times with every doubling of depth; structurally, however, the building might be of any length along the front, although in theory it ought not to exceed 13 bays and may never actually have exceeded 11 bays in the more recent dynasties.
A distinctively different engineering system for supporting the roof appears today mostly in the southwestern region of China, using tall, thin roof purlin-to-ground columns along the full length of the gable end and horizontal tie beams that penetrate these timber columns. Known as chuandou, this system allows for endless possibilities in the geometrical design upon the gable wall, unlike the more standardized tailiang system. In place of column-top bracketing, slanting wooden struts extend support for the eaves purlin diagonally downward to the columns. It is possible that chuandou architecture was once standard throughout much of China before the Han dynasty and that it retreated to that region with the disappearance of tall timber in the north and with the arrival of the timber-saving bracketing system that gradually came to characterize most traditional Chinese architecture.
The origin of the distinctive curve of the roof, which first appeared in China about the 6th century ce, is not fully understood, although a number of theories have been put forward. The most likely is that it was borrowed, for purely aesthetic reasons, from China’s Southeast Asian neighbours, who cover their houses with atap (leaves of the nipa palm [Nypa]) or split bamboo, which tend to sag naturally, presenting a picturesque effect. The upswept eaves at the corners of the Chinese roof, however, do have a structural function in reducing what would otherwise be an excessive overhang at that point.
In the “pavilion concept,” whereby each building is conceived of as a freestanding rectilinear unit, flexibility in the overall design is achieved by increasing the number of such units, which are arranged together with open, connecting galleries skirting around rectilinear courtyards; diversity is achieved through design variations that individualize these courtyard complexes. In the private house or mansion, the grouping of halls and courtyards is informal, apart from the axial arrangement of the entrance court with its main hall facing the gateway; but in a palace, such as the gigantic Forbidden City in Beijing, the formal halls are ranged with their courtyards behind one another on a south-to-north axis, the state halls building up to a ceremonial climax and then receding toward more private courts and buildings to the north. Ancestral halls and temples follow the palatial arrangement. The scale of a building, the number of bays, the unit of measure used for the timbers, whether bracketing is included or not, and the type of roof (gabled, half- or full-hipped, with or without decorative pent roof and with or without prominent decorative ridge tiling and prominent overhang) all accord with the placement and significance of the building within a courtyard arrangement, with the relative importance of that courtyard within a larger compound, and with the absolute status of the whole building complex. The entire system, therefore, is modular and highly standardized.
The domination of the roof allows little variation in the form of the individual building; thus, aesthetic subtlety is concentrated in pleasing proportions and in details such as the roof brackets or the plinths supporting the columns. Unused to any major variation, the Chinese became unusually sensitive to subtle architectural differentiation. Tang architecture achieved a “classic” standard, with massive proportions yet simple designs in which function and form were fully harmonized. Architects in the Song dynasty were much more adventurous in designing interlocking roofs and different roof levels than were their successors in later centuries. The beauty of the architecture of the Ming and Qing dynasties lies rather in the lightweight effect and the richness of painted decoration.
The radical standardization of Chinese architecture was best expressed in its system of measurement, which by the Song dynasty had developed eight different grades of measure, depending upon the status of the buildings and of individual buildings within a given compound. The unit of measure (a given inch) was larger for a more important building; the buildings flanking and facing it would use a slightly smaller unit, and so forth. By that measure, as a building expanded in status and scale, each part of it expanded accordingly; the structure of a larger building was better supportive of the weight it had to carry, while visually and aesthetically, consistent proportions were maintained from one building to the next. Modular in the extreme, buildings were designed to persist through the repeated replacement of parts, so that any given building has not only an original construction date but may belong to many different periods in between.
This entire system of regularity produced an architecture that changed but little and therefore could be “read” with great clarity by all. It defined, with little ambiguity, who could go where and shaped a world that told everyone their place in it. On the one hand, its restrictiveness may account for why the names of so few traditional Chinese architects are known. On the other hand, a system so neatly integrated in all of its features from a very early time, from the Han period on, seems to have needed little improvement and never underwent periods of radical redefinition like that which left Europeans with Romanesque and Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque. The Chinese architectural system was not considered to have been man-made at all but essentially to have been revealed by heaven. With so little change being possible, and only slow, nearly invisible evolution taking place, with no one to take credit for it, it is understandable that until the late 1920s, with the research of Liang Sicheng (1901–72), Liang’s wife, Lin Huiyin (1904–55), and Liu Dunzhen (1896–1968), no one even knew which buildings were truly old and which were new.
Stylistic and historical development to 220 ce
Neolithic and Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 bce)
The best evidence for early architecture in northern China comes from Neolithic villages such as Banpo, near present-day Xi’an, discovered in 1953 and datable to the 5th–4th millennia bce, revealing building systems not yet traditionally Chinese. Two types of buildings predominated within a village surrounded by a deeply dug moat: circular buildings with conical roofs, built above ground; and square buildings with pyramidal roofs, which were semi-subterranean. Already, however, the thatched roofs were suspended by means of columns, beams, and raftering, while the wattle-and-daub walls were not weight-bearing, just as would be the case in later times. And, as at the Banshan Neolithic village in the 3rd millennium bce, cemeteries were already located in south-facing foothills to the north of the village, as was the ideal throughout much of later Chinese history.
Excavations of the Shang era at Luoyang, Zhengzhou, and Anyang have revealed an architecture that begins to take on traditional Chinese form: massive earthen walls surrounding emergent urban centres, rectilinear buildings set up on rammed-earth foundations (layers of earth pounded to stonelike hardness and durability), and postholes of timber buildings with wattle-and-daub walls (woven rods and twigs covered and plastered with clay) and thatched roofs. The largest building yet traced at Anyang is a timber hall about 30 metres (90 feet) long, the wooden pillars of which were set on stone socles, or bases, on a raised platform. Ordinary dwellings were partly sunk beneath ground level, as in Neolithic times, with deeper storage pits inside them. There is no sign of the structural use of brick or stone or of tile roofs in any of the Anyang sites. Along the banks of the Huan River to the northwest of modern Anyang, royal tombs consisted of huge, square, rammed-earth pits approached by two or four sloping ramps. Lined and roofed with timber, the tombs were sunk in the floor of the pit. Tomb walls and coloured impressions left on the earth by carved and painted timbers include zoomorphic motifs very similar to those on ritual bronze vessels (see metalwork: Non-Western). Traces of a painted clay wall found elsewhere at Anyang, in a royal stone- and jade-carving workshop, demonstrate that aboveground buildings were decorated with similar designs and indicate a uniformity of design principles and themes in virtually all media at that time, including ritual bronze decor.
The Zhou dynasty (1046–256 bce)
Remains of a number of Zhou cities have been discovered, among them capitals of the feudal states. They were irregular in shape and surrounded by walls of rammed earth. Some long defensive walls also have been located, the largest being one that protected the state of Qi from Lu to the south, stretching for more than 500 km (300 miles) from the Huang He to the sea. Chu had a similar wall along its northern frontier.
Foundations of a number of palace buildings have been found in the cities, including Fengchu and, at Huixian, the remains of a hall 26 metres (85 feet) square, which was used for ancestral rites in connection with an adjacent tomb—an arrangement that became common in the Han dynasty. An important late Zhou structure used for a number of functions in the conduct of state rituals and incorporating a complex range of symbolic numerical systems was the Spirit Hall (Mingtang), discussed in a variety of Zhou literature but not yet known for that period through excavations. Late Zhou texts also describe platforms or towers, tai, made of rammed earth and timber and used as watchtowers, as treasuries, or for ritual sacrifices and feasts, while pictures engraved or inlaid on late Zhou bronze vessels show two-story buildings used for this type of ritual activity. Some of these multistory buildings are now understood, through modern excavations of two- and three-story Qin and Han palaces and of state ritual halls at Xianyang, Xi’an, and Luoyang, to have been constructed around a large, raised, pounded-earth core that structurally supported upper building levels and galleries and into which surrounding lower-level chambers were inserted.
The origins of the Chinese bracketing system also are found on pictorial bronzes, showing a spreading block (dou) placed upon a column to support the beam above more broadly, and in depictions of curved arms (gong) attached near the top of the columns, parallel to the building wall, extending outward and up to help support the beam; however, the block and arms were not yet combined to create traditional Chinese brackets (dougong) or to achieve extension forward from the wall. Roof tiles replaced thatch before the end of the Western Zhou (771 bce), and bricks have been found from early in the Eastern Zhou.
The Qin (221–206 bce) and Han (206 bce–220 ce) dynasties
In 221 Qin Shihuangdi (“the First Sovereign Emperor of Qin”) put in place the elements that provided the foundation for the succeeding Han dynasty: he centralized the Chinese state and its legal system and standardized the systems of weights and measures and the Chinese writing system. Further, he consolidated many of the walls of northern China into an architectural network of barriers and beacon towers for rapid communication. From these towers, watchmen could identify suspicious military movement and relay the information across the entire length of the wall across north China in a single day.
While little except walls and tombs remains of the architecture of either the Qin or Han dynasties, much can be learned about Han architecture from historical writings and long descriptive poems, known as fu. Clearly this was an era of great palace building. Shihuangdi undertook the building of a vast palace, the Efang Gong or Ebang Gong, whose main hall was intended to accommodate 10,000 guests in its upper story. He also copied, probably at reduced scale, the palaces and pavilions of each of the feudal lords he had defeated; these buildings displayed an encyclopaedia of regional architectural styles, stretched more than 11 km (7 miles) along the Wei River, and were filled with local lords and ladies captured from the different states.
The first emperor’s tomb was part of a city of the dead that covered nearly 2 square km (0.75 square mile) and was surrounded by double walls, with numerous gates, corner towers, and a ceremonial palace. The mausoleum itself was surmounted by an artificial mound, a feature not known in the Shang or early Zhou and first found among the tombs of the 4th–3rd centuries bce near Jiangling in Hubei province. About 43 metres (141 feet) high, this tumulus was shaped like a triple-layered truncated pyramid symbolizing heaven, man, and earth. The tomb, which has not yet been excavated, reportedly featured a large chart of the heavens painted on its domed vault and a three-dimensional representation of the earth below, with rivers of liquid mercury driven by mechanical contrivances. Excavations around the tomb have uncovered a large protective terra-cotta “spirit army” of some 8,000 life-size warrior figures along with 400 horses and 100 chariots placed in battle formation in a series of pits beneath the nearby fields. Molded in separate sections, assembled, then fully painted, these warrior figures were executed in minute and realistic detail and provide evidence of an early naturalistic sculptural tradition that was scarcely imagined by scholars before their discovery in 1974. For the heads, some 30 different models were used, and each was hand-finished to give further variety. In 1982 a pair of precisely engineered bronze replicas (104 cm [40 inches] high) of the imperial chariot, with considerable gold and silver inlay, was excavated, each with a charioteer and four horses.
The main audience hall of the Western Han Weiyang palace was said to have been about 120 metres (390 feet) long by 35 metres (115 feet) deep, possibly smaller than its largest Qin predecessor yet much larger than its equivalents in the Beijing palace today. From the Zhou dynasty (1046–255 bce) through the Yuan (1206–1368 ce), no architectural structure called forth more intense consideration than the Spirit Hall, or Mingtang, which was the predecessor of Beijing’s Temple of Heaven. The site of the Han ritual hall, in the southern suburbs of Han dynasty Chang’an, was excavated in 1956–57. Translating traditional ritual values into symbolic architecture, the Mingtang was surrounded by an outer circular moat and set on a circular foundation (the two circles together forming a disk, or bi, symbolic of heaven) that was further enclosed within an intermediate rectilinear colonnade (symbolic of earth). The three-story hall itself (the number three signifying heaven, man, and earth) was built around a raised earthen core. It is thought to have been a composite ritual structure that included a royal academy on the first floor; a second floor divided into nine zones, corresponding to the four seasons and the “five phases” theory of change, with five inner shrines and with outer spaces for monthly ritual offerings; and a third-floor central hall surrounded by a terrace (lingtai, or “spirit platform”) for observation of the heavens and regulation of the calendar.
The Han palaces were set about with tall timber towers (lou) and brick or stone towers (tai) used for a variety of purposes, including the display and storage of works of art. Ceramic representations of Han architecture provide the first direct evidence of true bracketing, with simple brackets projecting a single step forward from the wall (and sometimes several steps upward from the wall) in order to support the roof projection.
Han tombs are among the most elaborate ever constructed in China. In some localities they are of timber, but more often they are of brick or stone, divided into several chambers, and covered with a corbeled vault or, more rarely, a true arched vault. The tombs of the Han emperors were enclosed in gigantic earthen mounds that are still visible today, but some royal tombs began the later practice of burial in hollowed-out natural hills. Many Han tombs were decorated with wall paintings, with more permanent and expensive stone reliefs, or with stamped or molded bricks.
The most remarkable excavated tomb of the period belonged to the wife of a mid-level aristocrat, one of three family tombs of the governor of Changsha found in a suburb of that southern city, Mawangdui, and dating from 168 bce or shortly after. Small in scale but richly equipped and perfectly preserved, the wooden tomb consists of several outer compartments for grave goods tightly arranged around a set of four nested lacquered coffins. An outer layer of sticky white kaolin clay prevented moisture from penetrating the tomb, and an inner layer of charcoal fixed all the available oxygen within a day of burial, so the deceased (Xin Zhui, or Lady Dai, the governor’s wife) was found in a near-perfect state of preservation. Included among the grave goods, which came with a written inventory providing contemporaneous terminology, are the finest caches yet discovered of early Chinese silks (gauzes and damasks, twills and embroideries, including many whole garments) and lacquerware (including wood-, bamboo-, and cloth-cored examples), together with a remarkable painted banner that might have been carried by the shaman in the funerary procession.
