The Stone Houses
3 min readThe stone houses refer to residences of Buyi nationality. Some people of Buyi nationality live in pile dwellings or half-side buildings, but the most representative residences of Buyi nationality are the stone houses. People of Buyi live in the south, southwest and middle of Guizhou province, while the most famous stone houses are in Zhenning and Anshun counties.
In the mountainous Guizhou province, the landscape is rough with thin soil layer and abundant stones. The farmland is invaluable, as the flat dam farmland accounts for only 2.4% of the total land in the province. In order to save the land, the local people would not build walls with soil or clay stones, but with bamboo orstones, and people of Buyi would build stone houses. Stones in Guizhou have many advantages. They are mainly lime stones with moderate rigidity. And because they arelittle affected in the developing period of stone layer, different layers are clear and the stones can be easily divided into pieces. The lime stones are suitable to build stone houses. In addition, as the terrane in Guizhou is exposed in the air, it is easy to exploit stones.A1l these advantages make stones widely used in local areas. Streets, bridges and houses are all built with stones. The house foundation, walls, windows and steps are all built with stones as well. It is an amazing world of stones.
The stone houses are also called slab stone houses with a rectangle plane structure, usually in the form of “one bright room and two dark rooms”. Walking through the front gate, we will enter the bright room. In front of the bright room is a hall house which is the main house and also the living room of the slab stone house. Behind the hall house is a back room used as store room. These two rooms are bright. Two dark rooms refer to two side-rooms, each being divided into front and back rooms. The lower part of the front room is the basement for raising livestock, and the upper part is bedrooms. The back room of the side-room is bedroom or kitchen. The roof is made by piling ripraps up together. Although the surface seems disorderly, the ripraps press each other to completely avoid water leaking, which is one of the”eight odds”of Guizhou. The stone used to build walls are polished carefully, but it is not troublesome. Thanks to the texture of stones in Guizhou. Usually the stones are of similar size, so it is easy to put them in good order.
However, sometimes in order to build a stone house in a short time, there can be stones of different sizes. Usually larger stones are placed in the bottom, and stones are becoming smaller upward for the sake of firmness. There are differentcolors as wel1, often white, grayish blue, and light red. These colors are combined together to produce the visual response of bright or dark, thus giving a changeable aesthetic feeling. Although they are called stone houses, not all parts of the houses are made of stones in fact. Stones are just used to build walls and steps, but it is the crossbeam made of log supporting the weight of the house. Timbers yet are used to support the floor board and the gallet roof of the whole house.
The stone houses are results of the struggle between the local people and thenature. They manifest the fortitudinous spirit and great creativity of Chinese people. The appearance of stone houses is simple with no strong decoration, but i is a representation of the harmonious unity of traditional Chinese folk houses and the environment.
