I had this video playing in my sidebar for a while, but I’ve decided to start embedding videos directly into my posts so that they are easier to view and so that I can add more dynamic content.
Bibliographies in Print
陈春生/ Chen Chunsheng. 中国古建筑文献指南 1900-1990/ Sources on Traditional Chinese Architecture 1900 – 1990. 北京: 科学出版社, 2000.
Vance, Mary A. Gardens of China: books in English. Monticello, Ill.: Vance Bibliographies, 1980.
—-, Chinoiseries: a bibliography. Monticello, Ill.: Vance Bibliographies, [1985]
Doumato, Lamia. Chinese architecture: a bibliography. Monticello, Ill.: Vance Bibliographies, [1985]
Online Sources
China’s Vernacular Architecture: Ronald Knapp’s website
http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~knappr/
中国民族建筑网/ National Architecture Institute of China
http://naic.21cnbiz.com/journal.asp
A Selected Bibliography of Traditional Chinese Architecture by Jerome Silbergeld, Cary Liu, Nancy Steinhardt, Wei Yang (2004)
http://tang.princeton.edu/ChineseArchitecture2004.pdf
Smithsonian Art of China: Architecture and Landscape Architecture/Gardens
http://www.si.edu/Encyclopedia_SI/freersac/chinarct.htm#Architecture
Jens Aaberg-Jørgensen’s website on China Dwelling: Links and Sources
http://www.chinadwelling.dk/
Tsinghua University library catalog
http://innopac.lib.tsinghua.edu.cn/search*eng/Y
中国美术分类全集•中国建筑艺术全集 (以下四册) [Complete Categories of Chinese Art • Art of Chinese Architecture] (with the following four volumes)
侯幼彬 . 宅第建筑（一）（北方汉族）北京：中国建筑工业出版社. 1999. ISBN: 7-112-03803-0
陆元鼎. 宅第建筑（二）（南方汉族）北京：中国建筑工业出版社. 1999. ISBN: 7-112-03804-9
杨谷生. 宅第建筑（三）（北方少数民族）北京：中国建筑工业出版社. 2003. ISBN: 7-112-04793-5
王翠兰. 宅第建筑（四）（南方少数民族）北京：中国建筑工业出版社. 1999. ISBN: 7-112-03805-7
中国美术全集•建筑艺术编（袖珍本）: 民居建筑 [Complete Works of Chinese Art• Art of Architecture: Vernacular Architecture (pocket edition)] 北京: 中国建筑工业出版社, 2004. ISBN: 7-112-06873-8
中国美术全集•建筑艺术编: 民居建筑 [Complete Works of Chinese Art • Art of Architecture: Vernacular Architecture] 著译者：陆元鼎等 [ed. Lu Yuanding et. al] 北京：中国建筑工业出版社，1988. ISBN：7-112-00498-5
中国美术分类全集•中国建筑艺术全集: 古代城镇 [Complete Categories of Chinese Art• Art of Chinese Architecture: Ancient Cities and Towns] 著译者: 汤道烈等 [ed. Tang Daolie et. al] 北京：中国建筑工业出版社，2003. ISBN: 7-112-04789-7
Liu, Dunzhen, 1896- 劉敦楨, 1896- Zhongguo zhu zhai gai shuo = 中國住宅槪說,
Liu, Dunzhen, 1896- 劉敦楨, 1896- Liu Dunzhen wen ji. 劉敦楨文集.
I’m currently putting together a bibliography on Chinese vernacular architecture, in Chinese and English, since I don’t read another language. While there seems to be a lot of books available in China about Chinese vernacular architecture: the ubiquitous travel guides about “famous” villages and towns, which have been isolated in geography and whose architecture has been “frozen” in time until very recently when the first wave – and then, wave after wave after that – of tourists started swarming, tramping and trashing every corner of the country; the lightweight “cultural /historic/architectural heritage” series (fast-food versions of knowledge acquisition, as seen befitting the current “modern” world and its “modern” pace of life) on xiangtu jianzhu /乡土建筑 (vernacular/folk architecture) and minju jianzhu /民居建筑 (residential architecture), occupy the most conspicuous space of every bookstore, there is only a small amount of scholarly work dealing with Chinese vernacular architecture seriously and insightfully. My bibliography will be highly selective, very eclectic, and far from complete, though I will try my very best to keep it updated. My intention is to get a closer look at what’s out there that’s helpful in researching Chinese vernacular architecture. Any omission of anything significant is most likely due to the fact that my studies have not yet taken me there.
These are some diary entries that I made when traveling in southwestern
Mahjong has to be the main form of people’s entertainment here. Inside every open door is a mahjong table. I bet there are more people playing today, because of the rain.
The houses on the old street all look dilapidated – no one is keeping them up. Many of them look abandoned, and like they’re going to fall apart at any second. I looked into the houses through open doors, at the floors, and what was in the rooms, wondering if people here ever cared about the sanitation conditions and comfort of their living space. It seems that working takes up all of their time – except for playing Mahjong perhaps.
At first we wanted to go see the Ancestral Home of the Sun Family. But it sounded quite far away, and the road wasn’t very good. We then decided on a rafting trip on the river to get a better look at the village. The few people in the raft rental store seemed unprofessional, not quite matching their 60RMB per person charge. They did not even have their own car – we would have had to rent one from one of the other villagers. So on and so forth; in the end, it was a waste of a precious half an hour. We eventually decided against our impulse, since it was obvious that it was more trouble than it was worth.
So after wasting away our morning like that, we got on a bus at around 11am to Baisha, hoping to catch a boat from there to Songgai, as we heard there were boats.
Riding on the tiny little bus with us was a small funeral party. A woman had a white strap of cloth on her head, the tip of which hung all the way down to the back of her knees; she also had a linen rope wrapped around her waist. Written on her bag was a memorial to her mother. I thought about how I didn’t see this anymore, since I moved to the city.
After an hour over dirt roads, we arrived at the Baisha bus station around noon. We hired a rickshaw that took us to the wrong dock – which turned out not to matter, because the boat for Zhuduo through Songgai had already left Baisha 45 minutes earlier.
Missing the boat actually turned out to be a great turn of luck! Standing there on the dock, we saw row after row of old houses stretching out before us along the banks of the
A quick five minute look and we decided to spend the entire afternoon at this place that twenty minutes before we had thought was just a transfer point. We found a guesthouse, dropped our bags, had a shower and went out for a bowl of noodles. This place was just like Tanghe – we couldn’t find anything else to eat!
We started our exploration from a roughly east-west street called
It was so much better here than in Tanghe! Most of the houses were lived in, although the majority of the occupants were elderly. The expression on their faces and the way they talked about the old town went something like, “well, they are just some old rickety houses, what’s there to see?” If people that have lived in these houses their entire lives think this way, what will happen to the structures when a younger generation take them over? If ancient alleyways and courtyard houses in Beijing – the capital of China – were torn down and people didn’t do anything about it, what chance do a few streets of houses have in rural China to escape the wrecking ball?
What impressed me most was a peculiar little two-story house at the corner of Fengming and Minsheng streets, labeled as
Although this blog is still a work in progress, I wanted to make it public so that I can leverage the community of architectural historians on the web to help me build the best site possible. This site will focus on the developing field of Chinese vernacular architectural history and will hopefully function as both a place of insight, questions and reference for anyone – novice and professional historian alike – that is interested in recording, analyzing and preserving China’s rich architectural history.
