Stylistic and historical development since 1912

The influence of foreign styles

Until the mid-1920s, official and commercial architectural commissions in China were chiefly designed in an eclectic European style popularized by such treaty ports as Guangzhou (Canton), Xiamen, Fuzhou, and Shanghai, much of it designed by foreign architects. However, about 1925 Lü Yanzhi designed the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum located in Nanjing, one of the first important constructions designed entirely by a Chinese architect in modern history. The building’s comprehensive plan drew on the style of emperors’ tombs of the Ming and Qing dynasties, a notion of historical reference that greatly inspired young Chinese architects. In 1925 a group of foreign-trained Chinese architects, including Zhuang Jun and Fan Wenzhao (Robert Fan), launched a renaissance movement to study and revive traditional Chinese architecture and to find ways of adapting it to modern needs and techniques. In 1930 they founded Zhongguo Yingzao Xueshe (“The Society for the Study of Chinese Architecture”). The following year Liang Sicheng joined the group; he would be the dominant figure in the movement for the next 30 years. The fruits of these architects’ work can be seen in new universities and in major government and municipal buildings built in Beijing, Nanjing, and Shanghai during the 1930s, where they contended with the rise of Western-designed architecture such as the old Shanghai concert hall (formerly known as the Nanjing Theatre) and the Customs House along Shanghai’s Bund. The war with Japan (1937–45) put an end to further developments along these lines for a time; however, this tradition was revived in the 1950s with buildings such as the National Art Gallery of China (1959) in Beijing and is still practiced to this day.

After 1949, the urgent need in China for housing and industrial building led to many examples of purely utilitarian architecture and to major construction projects such as dams and bridges. Beijing and other big cities were transformed by spectacular planning projects, but an awareness of the traditional role of symbolism in architecture was often retained and adapted. Indeed, much of the architecture in the 1950s was built in the Soviet style of imposing edifices centered on grand squares and axes. During this period, large portions of the Forbidden City in Beijing were restored and established as a public museum. Lamentably, most of the city’s great outer walls were taken down in the name of modernization and to facilitate vehicular circulation. A new primary thoroughfare (Chang’an Boulevard), now symbolically on an east-west axis rather than traditionally oriented north-south, was also established there. In 1959 a vast square for public political activity was completed in front of the Tiananmen (Gate of Heavenly Peace, the entryway to the Imperial City), flanked on one side by the complex containing the Museum of Chinese History and the Museum of Chinese Revolution and on the other side by the Great Hall of the People. These dignified structures, part of the “Ten Grand Buildings” built from 1958 to 1959, were modeled after the Soviet style, with a hint of the Chinese vernacular in details such as a slight turn of a cornice.

Over the course of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), many magnificent older buildings and their exquisite decorations were seriously damaged or destroyed, as the new regime regarded them as emblems of decadence and moribundity. Most new commissions were monotonously imposing structures. The end of Cultural Revolution architecture was marked when the regime’s founder, Mao Zedong, died in 1976 and was buried in a grand mausoleum, located at the south end of Tiananmen Square. Designed by a large team of architects that same year, the monument bears a resemblance to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.