Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt - Chinese Architecture in an Age of Turmoil, 200-600

Chinese
Architecture

Chinese
Architecture

A History

Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt

Princeton University Press

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright 2019 by Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt

Published by Princeton University Press
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018961518
ISBN 978-0-691-16998-9
eISBN 978-0-691-16998-9 (ebook)
Version 1.0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Michelle Komie and Pamela Weidman

Production Editorial: Karen Lynn Carter

Design: Luke Bulman Office, New York

Jacket illustration: (front) Hall for Worship of the Ancestors, Ancestral Temple complex, Beijing, early fifteenth century with many later repairs. Photo by author (back) Residence, Hong village, Huizhou, Anhui, Ming-Qing. Photo by author

Production: Steven Sears

Publicity: Jodi Price and Katie Lewis

Copyeditor: Anita OBrien

To the students

Contents

viii

x

xi

Preface

I am often asked how in the years when China was closed I came to study Chinese architecture. My passion for this field began in the early 1970s as a sophomore in Nelson Wus class, The Arts of Asia. It was followed the next year by a course entitled Chinese Architecture for which the textbook was a history of the subject written by Liu Zhiping in 1957. Professor Wu and Huang Pao-y in Taiwan, whose lecture notes were based on a class taught by Liang Sicheng at Tsinghua University, would be the only teachers I would have through my doctoral education who had seen Chinese buildings.

Finally, in 1983, I was in China. A conversation in a hotel lobby with a political science professor whose name I no longer remember has never left me. Knowing my interests, he asked me to explain what he should look for when standing in front of a Chinese building. I dont remember what I said, but the question has been with me ever since because I know I was not satisfied with my answer. Someone as deeply engaged in this field as I already wasit had been the subject of my dissertation and I had already taught a one-semester survey of Chinese architecturenot only should be able to articulate what is most fundamental about a Chinese building and the Chinese building tradition but should be able to do it with more confidence than someone who gave a lecture or two on architecture in a class on Chinese art or one on China in a class on global architecture. I was far from an answer at that time, but as I think back, I already knew what he was asking me: Why did so many buildings look like so many other buildings? Why was he observing almost exclusively wooden pillars and bracket sets and ceramic tile roofs? Was there a reason so many buildings the tour guide had taken him to looked so similar, so much like small versions of what he had seen in the Forbidden City? Were there other kinds of old buildings in the countryside or that had been destroyed?

I have taught survey classes on Chinese architecture seven more times since 1983, approximately every four years. Each time some of the buildings most pertinent to understanding Chinese construction and China through its architecture change. Yet the questions on which I began to reflect in 1983 have always been with me, as they have during each of the fifty or so times I have traveled to East Asia since then, each time I stand inside a building for the first time, and each time I return to one. Much of the canon in the books I read in the 1970s or 1980s is found in the pages that follow, but I have made important substitutions of better examples or newly surveyed structures and have eliminated some buildings based on new information that changes former understanding of them.

Through the 1980s the books with the words gudai jianzhu (premodern architecture) published in China or Japan numbered fewer than one hundred, and almost every one contained unique information. In the 1990s it became more cost- and time-efficient to make annual trips to China and look at the books than to buy and read all of them, because new books often summarized older ones. In addition, the explosion of new information in periodical literature never made it to the books. The bibliography here reflects what I have found most important in my own pursuit to understand Chinese architecture: the classics of the field from the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century; seminal publications of scholars and research institutes of the 1970s and 1980s; detailed monographs about individual structures or compounds that exemplify how site research, measuring, and excavation combine with information on steles, inscriptions, local records, dynastic histories, and seminal periodical articles. The books and selected articles listed have been the core of reading for students and student papers in courses I have taught. The cover-to-cover contents of the periodicals from which those articles are drawn are necessary reading for someone who wants to engage more deeply in the Chinese architecture field.

The book begins with the assumption that the reader may know nothing about China or about architecture. For that reason, and since more than 90 percent of scholarly study of China is in Chinese or Japanese, the endnotes are as short and succinct as possible; each title is listed in full in the bibliography. The notes are intended so that someone who seeks the next level of information knows where to begin, but the intent of the text is a coherent, continuous narrative through which the reader is not encouraged to stop, read the endnote, go to that source, and then return to the text. Also for the purpose of an uninterrupted text, Chinese characters appear only in the glossary of Chinese terms. Because many buildings in the course of four thousand years of construction have had the same names, the various usages of a name through all chapters, such as gate or hall or tower or monastery, are provided in parentheses.

In most prefaces, the reader finds at this point a list of grants that provided leave from teaching to write a book. My research in China of course has often been funded by Penn and numerous outside sources, but this book was written through teaching and lecturing. My lecture notes and study guides in the eight Chinese Architecture classes as well as public lectures with a similar title and, most important, the questions from those who heard them, are behind the introduction, level of discussion, and decisions about endnotes, use of Chinese terms, and use of characters. This book reflects the fact that while a scholar must be a superior text-reader, the field has moved from desktop architectural history of the generation of my teachers to the assumption that anyone who reads this book not only can see almost every building discussed but can walk inside and around it, draw, measure, and, if there are stairs, ascend to the upper stories.

As for every book or article I have written, I could not have finished this without the support of my family at every stage, and colleagues in Asia, North America, and Europe, or the support of Penn Visual Resources and Princeton University Press. Of the many, I single out Paul Goldin for reading this manuscript in its entirety; Petya Andreeva for checking the character glossary; Chen Wei for drawings; Constance Mood, Christal Springer, and Elizabeth Beck in Penn Visual Resources; and, at Princeton University Press, Michelle Komie for knowing it was time to write this book, Anita OBrien for copyediting exactly as I would have written, Pamela Weidman and Steven Sears for working with each illustration individually, and Karen Carter for seeing the book through to publication. Still, it is the students in the Chinese Architecture surveys and higher-level seminars whom I have been fortunate enough to teach, and the more than fifty whose dissertations I have been privileged to advise at Penn and other universities, now all valued colleagues, to whom this book is so gratefully dedicated.