Chinese Architecture

A History

Nancy Steinhardt

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780691191973
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Historia de la arquitectura

An unprecedented survey of the origins and evolution of Chinese architecture, from the last millennia BCE to today Throughout history, China has maintained one of the world's richest built civilizations. The nation's architectural achievements range from its earliest walled cities and the First Emperor's vision of city and empire, to bridges, pagodas, and the twentieth-century constructions of the Socialist state. In this beautifully illustrated book, Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt presents the first fully comprehensive survey of Chinese architecture in any language. With rich political and historical context, Steinhardt covers forty centuries of architecture, from the genesis of Chinese building through to the twenty-first century and the challenges of urban expansion and globalism.Steinhardt follows the extraordinary breadth of China's architectural legacy—including excavation sites, gardens, guild halls, and relief sculpture—and considers the influence of Chinese architecture on Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and Tibet. Architectural examples from Chinese ethnic populations and various religions are examined, such as monasteries, mosques, observatories, and tombs. Steinhardt also shows that Chinese architecture is united by a standardized system of construction, applicable whether buildings are temples, imperial palaces, or shrines. Every architectural type is based on the models that came before it, and principles established centuries earlier dictate building practices. China's unique system has allowed its built environment to stand as a profound symbol of Chinese culture.With unprecedented breadth united by a continuous chronological narrative, Chinese Architecture offers the best scholarship available on this remarkable subject for scholars, students, and general readers.

CHAPTER 1

Genesis of Chinese Buildings and Cities

The date of the earliest evidence of architecture or urbanism in China is determined by one’s definition of a building or a city. The physical evidence of cities is earlier than evidence of individual buildings, probably because buildings were made of perishable materials whereas city walls were constructed of rammed earth. Urbanism in China begins by the sixth millennium BCE. The evidence of city building for the next four millennia is primarily archaeological, with a wall the defining feature of a Chinese city. This physical definition is reflected in the translation of the Chinese character cheng as both wall and city. When a wall is found, Chinese archaeologists assume that it signifies a group settlement. Walls were erected earlier in China than in any other part of East or South Asia but so far do not predate Jericho’s tenth millennium BCE wall.

Chinese texts also offer a terse but clear statement about the earliest architecture: “In the remote past, (man) dwelt in caves or lived on open land.” Commentators explain its meaning as, “In the remote past, ancient rulers did not have palace halls. In the winter, they built caves, and in the summer, they erected nests.”¹ The reference to rulers (wang) is because the source is a text of China’s classical age that focuses on the life of the elite. The significant aspect of this statement for architecture is the use of verbs that translate as built or erected: altering the landscape with architecture is a concept as old as the human realization of a need for shelter. Equally significant is that today, earth-sheltered dwellings and residential architecture raised on stilts are still used in China (see figures 16.14, 16.16). This is the first example of a Chinese building practice with a multimillennial history. Some date cave dwelling hundreds of thousands of years earlier than evidence of urbanism. Here we begin with the archaeological record of the sixth millennium BCE.

Cities and Buildings before Written Records

Group settlements of extended families or larger units in which hunting, fishing, gathering, or planting may have been shared predate the formation or construction of cities in China by several millennia. Walled settlements whose inhabitants used stone implements and buried their dead in cemeteries trace to the sixth millennium BCE. A village in Li county, Hunan province, on the Yangzi River, had an earthen wall, 6 meters wide at the base that narrowed to about 1.5 meters at the top, roughly rectangular in shape, about 200 meters east to west and 160 meters north to south. The wall was enclosed by a ditch, perhaps anticipating the moats that would become standard in Chinese cities for the rest of the premodern period.² Several thousand kilometers to the northeast, in Aohanqi, Inner Mongolia, a ditch, but without wall remains, encompasses another settlement of similar size dated 6200–5400 BCE. Residential buildings there are believed to have been arranged in rows.³ Remains of more complex settlements, also without walls, are in Wuyang county of Henan province in North Central China where 9 pottery kilns, 10 sacrificial dog burials, 32 urn burials, 45 building foundations, 349 tombs, 370 ash pits, and thousands of other objects including a wind instrument were found at a site dated 7000–5800 BCE.⁴ Semisubterranean communal dwellings from the fifth millennium BCE were discovered at Dadiwan in Gansu, China’s westernmost province. The site is more than a square kilometer, with several hundred residential foundations uncovered by the early twenty-first century. Foundation 901, a rectangular space oriented 30 degrees northeast, had a circular fire pit for cooking, with symmetrically positioned rooms on three sides. Two large pillars supported by pilasters were in the central area, right and left behind the fire pit. In front was an entryway or porch, a feature of other Dadiwan structures that is believed to signify residential architecture. That small area may have connected the pillar-supported, rectangular structure directly in front of it. The configuration of the main chamber with small rooms along its perimeter anticipates construction known as palaces at Erlitou from the second millennium BCE, discussed below. Connected large and small rectangular halls may anticipate gong plans of later time (figure 1.1). Floors of some of the Dadiwan foundations were painted.⁵

Dadiwan is a site whose artifacts identify it as belonging to Yangshao Culture, one of the major cultures of Neolithic China. Like most Chinese cultures of the period, it is named for a village (Yangshao) where numerous, representative examples of its pottery and other artifacts were excavated in 1921.⁶ Settlement began at China’s most famous preliterate site, Banpo, also an example of Yangshao Culture, in Shaanxi province, just east of Xi’an, in the fifth millennium BCE. Those remains have guided our understanding of Yangshao Culture since the 1950s. By the fourth millennium BCE, Banpo included houses of at least three sizes, three cemeteries, a pottery workshop, and animal pens (figure 1.2).⁷ Banpo is often compared with the 50,000-square-meter nearby site Jiangzhai, in Lintong county of Shaanxi, where some 120 residential foundations were found. Jiangzhai is completely excavated; Banpo is still largely underground.⁸ A nearly circular wall, surrounded by a moat, enclosed a Yangshao settlement in Zhengzhou, Henan province, dated 3300–2800 BCE. The wall was framed by wooden planks between which earth was pounded into layers. Like the moat, walls of pounded layers of earth (hangtu) would be used in Chinese city construction well into the second millennium CE. One cannot conclude that circular settlements were preferred at this time, nor that the suggestion of a round enclosure anticipates ritual architecture that would stand several millennia later in China, but Chengtoushan in Li county, Hunan, also was enclosed by a circular wall and moat (figure 1.3a).⁹ Approximately 300 meters in diameter, Chengtoushan’s wall was 28.6 meters at the base and 20 meters thick at the top, to a height of between 5 and 6 meters. The walls are thicker than those at any other known settlement in Asia at the time.

1.1. Plan of main chamber, with fire pit in center of room with two interior pillars and rooms on three sides, connected by corridor to smaller room with complete grid of pillars in front, foundation 901, Dadiwan, Qin’an county, Gansu

1.2. Reconstruction of moat-enclosed sector of Banpo showing “Great House” and residences with pyramidal and circular roof. On display in Banpo Museum in 1983

1.3. Plans of Neolithic Chinese cities: a. Circular plan of Chengtoushan, Li county, Hunan province, 3300–2800 BCE. b. Squarish plan of Pingliangtai, Huaiyang, Henan, third millennium BCE

The contemporary city Pingliangtai, in Huaiyang, Henan province, is the earliest evidence of a squarish city, an idealized shape that would be associated with Chinese rulers in later millennia (figure 1.3b).¹⁰ Only 185 meters on each side, Pingliangtai has two other features that would be part of many future Chinese imperial capitals: a prominent entry was at the center of its southern wall; it was approached from the south by an avenue that continued northward, to divide the city into eastern and western sections. Pottery drainpipes excavated at Pingliangtai confirm that China had an underground drainage system at the same time as the ancient South Asian city Mohenjo-daro.

Hemudu in Yuyao county of Zhejiang province, 22 kilometers northwest of Ningbo, flourished earlier and is the only site from this period that has wooden remains. The 40,000-square-meter site yielded pieces of notched timbers that would have been used in post-and-lintel construction, making it perhaps the most important location for the study of Neolithic Chinese wood joinery (figure 1.4). Remains are dated 5000–3200 BCE. Hemudu had a flourishing rice-growing culture more than six thousand years ago, with a population that raised pigs, water buffalo, and dogs. They used bows, arrows, and whistles, hunted and fished, made pottery vessels, and carved in bone and ivory. The largest structure with a wooden foundation was 160 square meters in base perimeter.¹¹

Hemudu marks a dramatic change that occurred by the third millennium BCE across China: size. Cities 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. Three million square meters (approximately 1.2 square miles) with multiple walled areas and a 30,000-square-meter cemetery, Taosi is a precursor or a very early example of the urban center around which a state and in which a society organized. The pattern would continue in China for several more millennia and would be described in writing by the first century CE. The second aspect of size as an agenda of construction in third millennium BCE China is the “great house” (Dafangzi), shown in the reconstruction of Banpo (see figure 1.2). Dafangzi is a Chinese term used to designate a structure significantly larger than others in the same settlement. Dafangzi are usually understood as palatial or ceremonial space. One thereby further assumes a kingly and/or priestly class. Dafangzi, especially in mid-twentieth-century Chinese writing that seeks to understand Chinese architecture in the context of contemporary society, is sometimes interpreted as a communal space. A Dafangzi also is believed to have existed at Hemudu.

Some of the most impressive buildings and cities in third millennium BCE China are associated with the Neolithic culture known as Longshan. More than fifty walled Longshan settlements from this period have been uncovered along the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers. Since its discovery in the 1920s, China’s most famous Longshan city has been at Chengziya(i) in Zhangqiu county, Shandong province. Dated ca. 2600 BCE, the pounded-earthen wall was an irregular rectangle, roughly 445 by 540 meters. The wall had 10-meter sides at the base and was about 5 meters wide at the top; today parts stand to a height of about 7 meters.¹²

Shimao, a late Longshan site in Shenmu county of Shaanxi, on the Yellow River near today’s border with Inner Mongolia, is likely to surpass Chengziya in important information about both Longshan Culture and the period just after it.¹³ Dated ca. 2000–1700 BCE, Shimao is the largest walled city of the period so far in China, and one of the most heavily fortified. Oriented roughly southward, its stone walls, the earliest evidence of this feature in China, enclose an area of 4 square kilometers with corner towers and the earliest evidence of fortified projections out from the city wall known in later China as mamian, literally “horse faces.” Gates are huge: the east gate stands on 2,500 square meters of space. In contrast to the wall, the gates, towers, and mamian are made of tightly packed, pounded earthen layers and then faced with stone. Oriented roughly north-south, Shimao divides into eastern and western sectors (figure 1.5). Traces of paint indicate that Shimao has some of the earliest evidence of murals in China.

Northern and southern walls, each about 500 meters in length, a 353-meter eastern wall, and north and south gates of a nearly south-oriented city were uncovered at Guchengzhai in Henan province. One exceptionally large building, presumably a Dafangzi, and other residential architecture were found as well. Its area was 176,500 square meters. Walls and building foundations were made using the rammed-earth technique. Guchengzhai is a late Longshan settlement, dated ca. 2000 BCE.¹⁴

A large, high mound of which more than 7 meters remain in Niuheliang, Liaoning province, an example of Hongshan ...