The Borders of Chinese Architecture

Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780674269576
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Historia de la arquitectura

An internationally acclaimed expert explains why Chinese-style architecture has remained so consistent for two thousand years, no matter where it is built. For the last two millennia, an overwhelming number of Chinese buildings have been elevated on platforms, supported by pillars, and covered by ceramic-tile roofs. Less obvious features, like the brackets connecting the pillars to roof frames, also have been remarkably constant. What makes the shared features more significant, however, is that they are present in Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, and Islamic milieus; residential, funerary, and garden structures; in Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and elsewhere. How did Chinese-style architecture maintain such standardization for so long, even beyond China's borders?Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt examines the essential features of Chinese architecture and its global transmission and translation from the predynastic age to the eighteenth century. Across myriad political, social, and cultural contexts within China and throughout East Asia, certain design and construction principles endured. Builders never abandoned perishable wood in favor of more permanent building materials, even though Chinese engineers knew how to make brick and stone structures in the last millennium BCE. Chinese architecture the world over is also distinctive in that it was invariably accomplished by anonymous craftsmen. And Chinese buildings held consistently to the plan of the four-sided enclosure, which both afforded privacy and differentiated sacred interior space from an exterior understood as the sphere of profane activity. Finally, Chinese-style buildings have always and everywhere been organized along straight lines.Taking note of these and other fascinating uniformities, The Borders of Chinese Architecture offers an accessible and authoritative overview of a tradition studiously preserved across time and space.

1

CHINESE ARCHITECTURE BEFORE CHINA

In 221 BCE, the man known as the First Emperor (Shi Huangdi [First August Thearch]) (259–210 BCE) conquered the last of seven states, thereupon founding the Qin dynasty. The dynasty endured only fifteen years, but thenceforth China’s history was a history of dynasties, many of them large and of long duration, against and alongside which smaller dynasties, kingdoms, and states vied for power. In his short reign, the First Emperor promulgated a single script, standard weights and measures, a national postal system, and the aspiration of a Great Wall that would define China’s northern border, if not protect China from northern invasions. This perceived boundary, never in fact completed as a walled barrier between China and her enemies to the north, was as powerful a symbol as any one might conceive of an understanding that China was a separate and definable entity from all that lie beyond it. The Wall is a supreme expression of human construction in China; if it has an equal, it is the Forbidden City in Beijing.

The First Emperor did not officially unify a building system, but he did look to the past in palace construction. Each time he conquered one of the states on his path to empire, he had a replica of its palace built in the expansive territory of his capital city. To him this act may have simply symbolized conquest, but like so much that he did, it was precedent-setting for China’s subsequent imperial history. A new conqueror enhanced his power as a ruler of China by appropriating for himself symbols, including architecture, of the conquered.

MAP 2 Sites mentioned through the second century CE.

Although attempts have been made, based on written records and excavation, to reconstruct the palaces and other architecture of Qin, the verifiable record is primarily pieces of bronze used to join and reinforce wooden building parts and ceramic tile decoration. The wooden notched timbers shown in Figure i.9 are extremely rare pieces of timber-frame architecture that survive from before the first millennium CE.

The physical evidence of cities in China is earlier than the evidence of individual buildings, for city walls were constructed of rammed earth. Group settlements predate the formation or construction of cities. Walled settlements whose inhabitants used stone implements and buried their dead in cemeteries date to the sixth millennium BCE. An example is in Li county, Hunan province, on the Yangzi River.¹ A more complex settlement, but without walls, remains in Wuyang county of Henan province in north central China.² In Dadiwan in Gansu, a rectangular space oriented 30 degrees northeast has a circular fire pit for cooking, with symmetrically positioned rooms on three sides, suggesting the beginnings of courtyard-style construction. One building foundation, dated to the fifth millennium BCE, has two large pillars supported by pilasters in the central area, right and left behind the fire pit with an entryway or porch in front.³ By the fourth millennium BCE, Banpo, just east of Xi’an, had residential buildings of at least three sizes, three cemeteries, a pottery workshop, and animal pens.⁴ Pingliangtai, in Huaiyang, Henan province, is the earliest evidence of a squarish city.⁵ Pingliangtai also had a prominent entry at the center of its southern wall and was approached from the south by an avenue that continued northward to divide the city into eastern and western sections. By the third millennium BCE, cities across China served populations that spread as many as 90 kilometers in more than one direction from the center. Taosi in Xiangfen, southern Shanxi, is an example.⁶ Taosi, Banpo of the previous millennium, and Hemudu a millennium earlier, all had a “great house” (dafangzi), a structure significantly larger than others in the same settlement that is understood as a palatial or ceremonial center. The walled city at Chengziya(i) in Shandong province was one of the earliest known when it was discovered in the 1920s. It is dated ca. 2600 BCE.⁷ Shimao, on the Yellow River in Shaanxi near today’s border with Inner Mongolia, dated ca. 2000–1700 BCE, the largest walled city up to its time, has the earliest evidence of stone, as opposed to mud-earth, walling.⁸ Oriented roughly southward, Shimao also has the earliest evidence of defensive projections from the city wall, a feature later known as mamian, literally “horse faces.” Niuheliang, in Liaoning province in northeastern China, dated ca. 4700–2900 BCE, is characterized by stone platforms, stone mounds, and carved jade.⁹ Several thousand kilometers to the south in Yuhang district of Hangzhou, a ceremonial altar within a walled and gated area is dated ca. 3300–2300 BCE. The many jade objects excavated here are believed to date earlier than those from Niuheliang.¹⁰

Thus, before 3000 BCE, aboveground architecture and urbanism were present across the expanse that is today’s China: remains in Henan, Hunan, Gansu, Liaoning, Gansu, Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Zhejiang are selected for mention above. The walled settlements confirm drainage canal systems, cemeteries, and workshops, and that wooden pillars were the primary support system for buildings. Hemudu and the placement of pillar holes at Banpo confirm the use of timber framing. Building foundations were made of rammed earth. Mud-earth and sun-dried bricks were used to fill in walls of a building supported by a wooden frame. Stone was used for altars as well as city walls. Whitewash and other forms of paint covered surfaces. Tombs and workshops, including kilns and areas designated for handicrafts, were part of cities and smaller settlements from this preliterate period. Great houses suggest communal hierarchy and perhaps ceremonial architecture. These features are found across the regions that the First Emperor would unite approximately 2500 years later.

ARCHITECTURE OF CHINA’S BRONZE AGE

The entry into the second millennium BCE is coincident with the period sometimes known as the Xia dynasty (ca. 2070–ca.1600 BCE). The Shang dynasty (ca.1600–1046 BCE) follows. The manufacture of bronze objects predates Shang; the logographic writing system develops during it. Many of China’s important architectural remains of Xia and Shang are in Henan province.

Erlitou is in Yanshi county of Henan on the Luo River that runs through the city of Luoyang. Between ca. 1900 BCE and ca. 1500 BCE, there were at least four phases of occupation. The largest of all contemporary sites in China, if there was a Xia dynasty, Erlitou exemplifies its material remains.¹¹ They include turquoise, which is believed to have been local. Erlitou’s population is estimated at having been 18,000–30,000, large enough to call it a city.¹² Clusters of building foundations of rammed earth are assumed to have been for ritual, and smaller units to have been palatial or residential. Seven foundations include three features that would be present through the next four millennia of Chinese construction: building complexes are oriented toward the south; pillar-supported structures divide into symmetrically positioned interior rooms that face southward in larger, four-sided, enclosed courtyards; gates pierce the south side of enclosing arcades or walls (Figure 1.1).

1.1 Reconstruction of palace 1, Erlitou, Yanshi, Henan, Luoyang Museum, ca. 1750–1530 BCE.

The Shang dynasty is known for huge cities. Erlitou of ca. 1700 BCE may have been a Shang capital, but after ca. 1600, China’s largest cities almost certainly were capitals.¹³ The wall of Erligang in the modern city Zhengzhou in Henan was a south-oriented rectangle of 6960 meters in perimeter and 20 to 32 meters wide at the base. Its northeastern corner was truncated. Eleven gaps in the wall probably indicate gates. The wall was made of both rammed earth and wooden planks. The Shang city sometimes known as Yanshi after the county in which is it located, the same county as Erlitou, had multiple walled sectors. The outer wall had eleven gates and was surrounded by a moat. An inner city of 740 by 1100 meters shared the southern sections of the eastern and western walls of the outer city. At its center was a 200-meter-square palace-city. Building foundations were positioned symmetrically on its east and west. The walls of the three cities—outer, inner, and palace—were 17 to 19 meters, 6 to 7 meters, and 2 meters, respectively, in thickness.¹⁴ Both the Zhengzhou and Yanshi cities had drainage systems. Palatial foundations at Yanshi confirm that the buildings they upheld used the construction system in place at Erlitou: exterior columns supported a main building that was divided into interior rooms; an enclosing structure, perhaps a pillared arcade, surrounded the courtyard in front of it; a gate was centrally positioned in front of the enclosure at a place that formed an axial line to the center of the back chamber.

The same construction principles were employed in a contemporary Shang complex in Panlongcheng in Hubei province. The 75,000-square-meter wall (about 290 by 260 meters) that enclosed the Shang city in Hubei was roughly four-sided, with water flowing around all but the northwestern corner and probably with a gate in each wall face.¹⁵ The outer wall was made by the same technique as used in Zhengzhou: layers of rammed earth were packed between and around wooden planks, with the widest base thickness 45 meters and the narrowest surviving part at the top, 18 meters. Intramural architecture suggests a more complicated building arrangement than can be verified at earlier or contemporary Shang sites: two building foundations are positioned in front and back of each other in an enclosure to which they are attached by side arcades. A gate is at the central front. As shown in reconstruction, the complex not only confirms the axial arrangement of major buildings, use of a front central gate, and four-sided enclosure around courtyards, it anticipates the configuration of complexes, specifically the Two Back Halls of the fourteenth-to-fifteenth-century Forbidden City (Figures 1.2 and i.21).¹⁶

When a single, clearly important example exists, in this case a front-and-back-hall arrangement that anticipates a building configuration employed by Chinese emperors 3000 years later, it is noteworthy. A second example of the same arrangement suggests that the scheme was a style of the period. A nearly square, rammed-earth wall, 300 to 310 meters on each face, uncovered in the 1990s at Fucheng, in Jiaozuo county, Henan province, is this kind of evidence. The wall enclosed a building foundation with two south-oriented halls in front of and behind each other, dated to the middle of the second millennium BCE.¹⁷

Shang China’s most important city and without a doubt its last capital, sometimes referred to as Yinxu (ruins of Yin), is in Anyang, Henan province...