Chinese Vernacular Architecture

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.

I was back in Beijing for about six weeks this summer, and things were getting worse. Whole neighborhoods of hutongs (traditional Beijing alleyways) are still being demolished, ancient residences gone, while new building projects are under way. Below are some pictures I took outside of the Qianmen area (almost right in the heart of old Beijing, see map below), where Dajiang Hutong and Xianyukou Hutong are being destroyed. The irony about the destruction is that the developers, while doing away with these ancient alleyways, put up photos and (prints of) paintings of the old hutongs and residences as they were and are supposed to be, on the billboards that they erected to cover up what’s going on behind them.

A sign indicating the name of the hutong (Dajiang Hutong) with guards petrolling and stopping visitors from going into the hutongs.

And this is what’s behind the billboards.

Another ancient alleyway, Xianyukou Hutong, is suffering the same fate.

Below is a map that shows where Qianmen (the Front Gate) area is in Beijing. Xianyukou Hutong is shown as Xianyukou St, just a little south of the Gate:

In his preservation work on the city of Suzhou, Professor Ruan sets out by providing a historic contextualization of the city, by examining its current economic, political, and social status, and the character of the city as determined by its historic and cultural significance in relation to its architectural heritage. In this case, the canal network, particularly the canals, bridges, walkways and residences are crucial.

The first significant step that Ruan took in his preservation effort was to divide the city into fifty-four neighborhoods roughly according to the physical location and administrative authority of the locality; he sets up a comprehensive computer database for them; he then studies each neighborhood and approaches them differently according to their specific character. His conservation plan includes everything from a guiding working principle, to a reconfiguration of the use of land, to strict guidelines for the height of new developments within the city, and improvement of such elements as infrastructure.

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The city of Suzhou has a history stretching back more than 2,500 years, serving as the capital city of the Wu Kingdom as early as the Spring and Autumn Period (722- 481 B.C.E.) in 514 B.C.E. It is situated on the lower reaches of the Yangtze River and on the shores of Lake Tai in the province of Jiangsu, China. The city has enjoyed an economic prosperity and social prominence, as evidenced by the popular Chinese saying that “In heaven, there is paradise. On earth, there are Suzhou and Hangzhou.”

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This series of posts are taken from a paper I wrote earlier this year about the practical aspect of historic preservation of Chinese vernacular architecture. It takes the city of Suzhou as a case study, and focuses specifically on Professor Ruan Yisan’s work on the city.

Ruan Yisan (b. 1934) is former Professor of Urban Planning & Design with the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at Tongji University of Shanghai, and Director of the National Research Center for Historic Cities of China. He is renowned for his preservation work throughout China on ancient cities such as Pingyao, Suzhou, and historic water towns on the Yangtze River region, all of which mentioned here are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. For more information on Professor Ruan and his work, see online sources on conservation of historic and cultural cities of China at http://www.mingcheng.org/chinese/rys/index.html and The 2004 Almanac of China’s World Heritage Sites. Through examining Ruan’s approaches and methods, I try to formulate an applicable general principle for studies on Chinese vernacular architecture, from a historic preservation point of view as is characteristic of Professor Ruan’s work.

The city of Suzhou serves as a perfect example of studies on Chinese vernacular architecture for two reasons. First, it is a city famous for its architectural heritage. Second, the awareness of this heritage and its cultural, historic, social and economic value among the various levels of government, residents, scholars, and others interested in the conservation and regeneration of the ancient city in the face of China’s unprecedented “modernization” process is considerably high and their achievements thus far unparalleled elsewhere in China.

This is something I wrote last year. I thought I’d share it.

The Art of Chinese Architecture: An Illustrated History (Yitao Xu, 2002) presents the development of the Chinese architectural system, as well as the social and technological conditions that have sustained Chinese architecture over the last 4,000 years. Among colorful illustrations of both photographs and architectural renderings are the text that covers palaces, ceremonial and religious temples and structures and landscape and vernacular architecture. It also contains sections on the works and lives of influential Chinese architects, both ancient and modern.

Xu’s illustrations – especially of dougong, the traditional interlocking support that ties the upper horizontal members to the columns and thus directs the weight of the rooftops down to the foundation – were detailed and accurate (as taken from my own firsthand experience from visiting structures built in this fashion). Through my travels to many of China’s historic places, I have come across many dougong, and Xu’s detailed labeling of each interlocking piece has assisted me to fully understand these complex wooden constructions.

Additionally, Xu proposes that Chinese architecture did not decline in the later dynasties of the Ming and Qing. According to Xu, “Architectural historians have overlooked the value of architecture from the Ming and Qing dynasties. However, Ming and Qing architecture did not only represent breakthroughs in creating artful collective space, it was also an innovative time for building techniques.” Xu’s assertion of the importance of later Chinese architecture (most texts consider the Tang Dynasty to be the artistic height) led me to reexamine the current literature available. I hope to explore and expand the literature of these later periods, specifically on vernacular structures.

These are some diary entries that I made when traveling in southwestern China’s Sichuan Province and Chongqing in the summer of 2004. On this three-week trip, I mainly traveled by bus over dirt roads or by boat on the Yangzi River to a dozen remote ancient villages, the oldest of which was 1400 years old. The simplicity, practicality and elegance of the architecture that I saw on this trip was one of the reasons that I decided to pursue an advanced degree in architectural history.

Pianyan Village. Sunday, August 29. Rained all day.

We stayed in the village all day walking around. We walked outside on the cobblestone street of the old town about fifteen times! We even walked to the little hill outside of the town to look around, feeling lazy and a little tired in the end. Was it also because we had to change three buses to get here yesterday?

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.

Tanghe Village and Baisha Town, Thursday, September 2.

The first half of this day was completely wasted.

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 Yangzi River. We decided to go and have a closer look.

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 Donghua Street that runs parallel to the Yangzi River. Later we found out that there were a few more major old streets in this small section of the city, including Fengming and Minsheng streets. We tried to ask about the name of the old town, but were told only names of these streets. It seems that after the new city of Baisha was constructed, the names that the old town had left were those few old streets.

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 #1 Fengming Street. It was peculiar not only because its height far exceeded its width from the façade, but also because of its gracefully overhanging awnings. The most interesting thing about this house was that one of its side walls was constructed along an inclined “road” (about one meter wide). Of all the places I’ve seen in China, this might be the coolest.

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.