Chinese architecture
2 min readThe cave was man’s earliest habitation. With the advent of agricultural development, man started to settle down on flat lands, in houses built with such natural materials as earth, stone, grass and wood. Ancient Chinese architecture style remains an independently developed system in the world, which is well-known for its wooden structure, imposing appearance, and refined architectural style.
The tilted wooden structure of folk houses and the regularly arranged ones with one large room sided by several small ones, unearthed respectively from the Hemudu site in southern China and from the Banpo site in northern China 6,000-7,000 years ago, can be considered typical of the time. The early ancient time was the period when Chinese architecture enjoyed great development and formed its own system. The system put emphasis on group combination in the unit of “courtyard”with a variety of space forms of different series: dominant-subordinate series or verse-rhythm series, for layouts of either neat and symmetrical palace structures or nonsymmetrical horticultural structures and folk houses. Records of Examination of Craftsmen: Craftsmen is the world’s earliest record of specialized architecture.
However, in earlier time, China already had construction drawings suchas the plane layout for Prince Zhongshan’s tomb, unearthed from the Pingshan site of Hebei province dating back to the late Warring States period, which indicates that a process of “drawing prior to construction”was then followed. As of the middle ancient time, Chang’ an city of Tang dynasty, at an approximate circumference of 36km with a population of nearly one million, was then the largest city around the world, well-known for its complete planning. Treatise on Architectural Methods by Li Jie of Northern Song dynasty, then one of the most complete works on architecture, marked China’s maturity and improvement of architectural development.
As of the late ancient time, grand and exquisite structures came into being with creative design, Stone pillars in Confucius Temple, Qufu, Shandong advanced technology and wonderful workmanship drawing the world’s attention, such as the palaces and gardens of Ming and Qing dynasties (the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven, Suzhou gardens, etc.). One more feature of Chinese ancient architecture is its distinctive decorations, including wooden, stone and brick sculptures, glaze, gilding, gold-plating, inlay, colour-painting, mural painting, lacquering, etc., to make the buildings splendid and elegant, or plain and isolated.
