Confucius’ Courtyard

Architecture, Philosophy and the Good Life in China

Xing Ruan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781350217614
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350217645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

For more than three thousand years, Chinese life – from the city and the imperial palace, to the temple, the market and the family home – was configured around the courtyard. So too were the accomplishments of China's artistic, philosophical and institutional classes. Confucius' Courtyard tells the story of how the courtyard – that most singular and persistent architectural form – holds the key to understanding, even today, much of Chinese society and culture.

Part architectural history, and part introduction to the cultural and philosophical history of China, the book explores the Chinese view of the world, and reveals the extent to which this is inextricably intertwined with the ancient concept of the courtyard, a place and a way of life which, it appears, has been almost entirely overlooked in China since the middle of the 20th century, and in the West for centuries. Along the way, it provides an accessible introduction to the Confucian idea of zhongyong ('the Middle Way'), the Chinese moral universe and the virtuous good life in the absence of an awesome God, and shows how these can only be fully understood through the humble courtyard – a space which is grounded in the earth, yet open to the heavens.

Erudite, elegant and illustrated throughout by the author's own architectural drawings and sketches, Confucius' Courtyard weaves together architecture, philosophy and cultural history to explore what lies at the very heart of Chinese civilization.

Part One

Heaven

A Panacea from the Courtyard

1

What Makes the Chinese House

King Linggong of Jin

(624–607 BCE), a notorious tyrant, ordered an assassin to kill the honest minster Zhao Dun

, who once witnessed the murderous behaviour of the King and protested in silence. The killer entered the main gate; it was unguarded. He then walked into the next gate; it was also unattended to. Into the courtyard, the assassin stepped up to the hall; not a soul was seen. Behind the hall through the passageway, the man peeked into the chamber: Zhao Dun sitting in the room was devouring a bowl of rice and fish. ‘Ah, what a benevolent man!’ sighed the killer. ‘I entered the outer gate and did not see anyone; I entered the inner gate, no one was there. Walking up to the hall, still I spotted nobody. He is such an approachable gentleman. Even though he is a prominent minister of the state, he only eats rice and fish. How frugal and simple is he? The King has ordered me to kill this man, but I cannot bring myself to this task. As such, I will not be able to see the King anymore.’ The assassin then knifed his own neck.¹

This story from Chinese antiquity, in a nutshell, illustrates the spatial configuration and essential meaning of the Chinese house – that is, a dwelling comprising a series of enclosed courtyards with an axial progression, which includes a prominent hall raised above the ground on a platform. The Chinese, however, did not, from the very beginning, live in courtyards, let alone relying on them as the primary housing pattern for other activities. Free-standing houses sitting on piles are found among the minority groups in southern China, and they can be seen as the living example of the prehistoric Chinese house, as seen at the Hemudu archaeological site in today’s Zhejiang province.² The living layout for these people, known in Chinese as ‘front hall and back room’ (qiantang houshi

), corresponds neatly with the Banpo site, the Yangshao settlement ruins found near the modern-day Xi’an in Shaanxi province. The site is right in the middle of the Yellow River basin – the cradle of Han Chinese civilization. The Yangshao Culture

, from 5000 to 3000 BCE, was a significant period of the Chinese Neolithic era. The tang

, roughly equivalent to ‘hall’ in English, accommodated, in the primordial sense, almost all indoor activities from cooking, eating, domestic work to ceremonies; sleeping was only separated in the later period at the rear in an enclosed room, called shi

. Such transformation mirrors partially what occurred in English housing history: evolving from the medieval English hall – where all sorts of domestic activities were congregated and different social classes mingled – to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English house in which separate rooms were dedicated to different purposes. But the Chinese, from antiquity through to the early twentieth century, never went beyond the differentiation between tang and shi.

On the contrary, the quintessential pattern of domestic living in a courtyard is typically described in the Chinese house as ‘one bright and two darks’ (yiming liang’an

), meaning that the tang is relatively open and bright (open to the courtyard), which is sandwiched between two shi (or fang

, also meaning room), the partially enclosed, hence relatively dark rooms. In any courtyard, to use the prototype of the single-courtyard house to illustrate, this pattern lays bare the relations between the courtyard/bright and building/dark, and the tang/bright and the shi/dark (Figure 1.1). The attempted murder of minister Zhao Dun reifies precisely the bright and dark relationship in his courtyard house. Naturally this is the spatial pattern that can be extended to large multiple-courtyard houses, which cannot possibly be realized in ramified housing clusters by using a free-standing ‘front hall and back room’ configuration. But what exactly is the meaning of ‘one bright and two darks’ when it comes to the nature of Chinese life lived in the courtyard?

Figure 1.1 ‘One bright and two darks’ courtyard pattern illustrated by a single courtyard example.

The conceptual parti

To answer this question, we ought to find out what the Chinese house was like at a time when the enduring Chinese worldview was established. We unfortunately have no surviving buildings to assist us with the reconstruction. Material evidence from archaeological sites and ruins is not nearly as comprehensive as seen in Roman Pompeii, but we shall soon realize that the lack of surviving houses and archaeological evidence is not necessarily a problem. Before we look at the reconstruction of an early Western Zhou (1027–770 BCE) house based on the unearthed site ruins, let us first examine the ‘prototype’ derived from the literature. The Chinese house is an idea; it can be derived from the written world, which is precisely what the Qing scholar Zhang Huiyan

(1761–1802 CE) attempted, according to his study of the ancient Zhou text Rituals and Etiquettes (Liyi

). Zhang’s intent was to give a concrete form to the scholar-official’s (shidaifu

) house in the Western Zhou and the Spring and Autumn periods (770–476 CE).

Much the same as minister Zh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Part One Heaven A Panacea from the Courtyard
• 1 What Makes the Chinese House
• 2 Heaven and What Is Below
• Part Two Heaven and Earth Equilibrium in the Courtyard
• 3 The Divergent Tower
• 4 Secluded World and Floating Life
• 5 A Deceiving Symbol
• 6 Literary Enchantment and the Garden House
• 7 The Golden Mean Finely Tuned
• 8 Living like ‘the Chinese’
• Part Three Earth The Emancipation of Desire and the Loss of Courtyard
• 9 The Irresistible Metropolis
• 10 The Assault of Modernity
• Epilogue: The Four or the Five
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright