Chinese Architecture: A History

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 O’Brien

To the students

Contents

viii    Preface

x      Chinese Dynasties

xi      Map of China

1      Introduction: Beyond the Forbidden City

8      Chapter 1: Genesis of Chinese Buildings and Cities

Cities and Buildings before Written Records

Cities and Buildings of the Bronze Age

Western Zhou to Warring States

20    Chapter 2: Architecture of the First Emperor and His Predecessors

Rulers’ Cities

Rulers’ Tombs

Architecture of China’s First Empire

32    Chapter 3: Han Architecture

Han Chang’an: The First Emperor’s Vision Realized

Han Luoyang and Other Cities: Realistic Imperial Vision and Nonimperial Presence

Han Tombs outside the Capitals

Additional Evidence of Han Architecture

China’s Earliest Buddhist Architecture

52    Chapter 4: An Age of Turmoil: Three Kingdoms, Two Jins, Sixteen States

Urbanism and Palaces in an Age of Disunion

New Buildings for a Buddhist Age

Tombs

72    Chapter 5: Northern Dynasties and Southern Dynasties

Cities and Palaces

Tombs of Royalty

Tombs in Gansu, Koguryŏ, and Datong

Great Age of Buddhist Cave-Chapels

China’s Earliest Pagodas

Toward a Timber Frame

A Buddhist Monument to Pious Deeds

Sarcophagus as Architecture

104  Chapter 6: Sui and Tang: Architecture for Empires

Three Great Cities

Palace Architecture in and outside the Sui-Tang Capitals

Sacred Wooden Architecture

Exemplary Tang Pagodas

Tombs

Five Extraordinary Buildings

Tang Architecture outside the Empire

126  Chapter 7: Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms

Humble Halls for Aspiring Rulers, 963–966

Tenth-Century Timber Architecture before 960

Official and Royal Tombs

Architecture of the Dali Kingdom

136  Chapter 8: Grandeur and Magnificence under Liao and Western Xia

The Ancestral Prefecture

Magnificent Halls—Liao Style

Liao Pagodas

Liao Tombs

Octagonal Construction: Liao and Western Xia

150  Chapter 9: The Chinese Building Standards

Fundamentals of the Chinese Timber Frame

Bracket Sets and Roofs

Jiehua

162  Chapter 10: Song Elegance and Jin Opulence

Religious Architecture North and South, 960–1127

Religious Architecture, 1127–1279

Secular Architecture

192  Chapter 11: The Chinese City between Tang and Ming

Urbanism on the Grasslands

Metropolises of Millions

Jin Capitals

The Road to Dadu

Yuan Dadu and Zhongdu

Cities and Princely Retreats outside the Capitals

202  Chapter 12: The Mongol Century

Eminent Halls

Other Yuan Buildings

Architecture of Foreign Faiths

220  Chapter 13: The Chinese Imperial City and Its Architecture, Ming and Qing

Imperial Nanjing

Imperial Beijing

Building Standards in Qing Palatial Architecture

Altars

Thirteen Ming Tombs

Qing Imperial Architecture

246  Chapter 14: Late Imperial Architecture in Chinese Style

Ming Buddhist Monasteries

Monasteries on Sacred Peaks

Architecture of Confucianism

Three Towers in Shanxi

268  Chapter 15: Convergences: Lamaist, Dai, Islamic

Architecture of Lamaist Buddhism

Chengde: Qing Vision Realized

Buddhist Architecture in the Yunnan Marshes

Dong Towers

Ming and Qing Islamic Architecture

298  Chapter 16: Garden and House

Gardens of South China

Imperial Gardens of Beijing

Residential Architecture

314  Chapter 17: China Comes to Europe, Europe Comes to China, Chinese Students Come to the United States

Chinoiserie

Sequestered European Architecture

China’s First Generation of Architects

334  Conclusion: Resolving the Forbidden City

The Counteraxis

342  Notes

348  Glossary

357  Selected Bibliography

377  Image Credits

378  Index

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 Wu’s 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-yü 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 don’t 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 was—it had been the subject of my dissertation and I had already taught a one-semester survey of Chinese architecture—not 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 O’Brien 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.

Chinese Dynasties

Map of China

Map 1. Chinese provinces and major cities, autonomous regions, and bordering countries

i.1. Forbidden City, Beijing, Ming-Qing, and today

INTRODUCTION

Beyond the Forbidden City

Chinese architecture rises across more than 4,000 kilometers, on a landmass of 9.707 million square kilometers (3.748 million square miles) on the eastern side of continental Asia. Yet when the two words, Chinese and architecture, are joined, almost anyone on any continent, usually without hesitation, visualizes a building from the Forbidden City (figure i.1). Most often it is the Hall of Supreme Harmony where the emperor of China held court from 1420 to 1912. With the possible exception of the Great Wall, the Hall of Supreme Harmony is the most recognized structure in China; it is the cover image of countless books and the single illustration for every variety of media. The hall is the identifier of China worldwide, not only because it presents such a clear image—high marble platform, vermilion wooden columns, complicated bracket sets, and a golden ceramic tile roof—but also because innumerable other buildings in China have so much in common with it. One can begin with other imperial structures such as the Hall of Spiritual Favors (Ling’endian) where sacrifices to the Yongle emperor, the man who ordered construction of the Forbidden City, were performed after his death in 1424 (figure i.2). One finds the same multitiered, stone elevation platform, approach from the front by stairs, vermilion pillars, bracket sets above them that support roof eaves made of ceramic tile and punctuated by parallel rafters in a 67-meter-tall, multistory pagoda, an example of religious architecture (figure i.3). Wood, brick, stone, and tile, the four materials used in all three buildings and the predominant materials in Chinese construction through the five millennia covered in this book, are put together in this way for most of that time.

These four materials are the province of craftsmen—carpenters, masons, and tilers—and unlike other Chinese arts such as painting or architecture in parts of the world such as Europe, Chinese construction has been considered a craft and its builders craftsmen for most of its history. Only a few names of men involved in the building industry in China before the twentieth century survive. Most of them were officials whose service at court included directing imperial-sponsored projects, perhaps occasionally even designing, and writing about construction. The classical Chinese language has no word for architect, only one for a person who engages in the craft of building. Instead, from as early as written records can confirm, the final millennium BCE, in every branch of Chinese construction—public or private, imperial or vernacular, religious or secular—principles and standards established centuries earlier dictated building practices. The standards were sanctioned and guarded by the Chinese court, and the government was the sponsor of all major manuals that dealt with official architecture. Craftsmen were not required to be literate, only to follow prescribed modules and methods so as to ensure that court dictums were followed.

The treatises expound a standardized system of construction that is maintained not just in imperial buildings of life and death and a towering religious monument (see figures i.1–i.3) but in temples hidden in the mountains, houses, and shrines, and in paintings and relief sculpture of architecture through the ages (figures i.4, i.5). The treatises do not categorize Chinese buildings according to their functions but rather by importance. They also distinguish buildings by material. Wood, the most widely used material for the support system of architecture in China, receives the most attention. It is differentiated by grade through which techniques for large-scale, important buildings are distinguished from smaller, less important ones.

Wood joinery and the manipulation of timber more generally are unique aspects of Chinese architecture. The Chinese system goes far beyond the frame, referred to by Chinese builders as the wooden skeleton. The interlocking network of vertical, horizontal, and sometimes diagonal or curved wooden members through which a structure is supported is the result of a modular system whereby the measurement of almost any piece can be calculated from the dimensions of another piece. Modular construction on a larger scale means that from individual components such as pillars to entire planar sections of a building, all can be replicated, increased, decreased, repositioned, or eliminated to change a temple into a palace, a shrine into a house, or a humble dwelling into a lavish family compound, and vice versa (figure i.6). The proportional relationships throughout a Chinese structure have accounted for stability in severe earthquakes and have made it possible for any builder to repair or replace damaged parts, including those assembled in the distant past. The use of a modular system based on a building’s rank and the ease with which wooden parts can be remade, replaced, or moved are perhaps the main reasons the perishable timber frame persisted for so long as the primary structural type in China.

In any configuration, the wooden pieces of a standard Chinese building divide themselves into three layers. Closest to the ground is the column network. The pillars that support a Chinese structure form a perimeter around the building. Sometimes there are interior columns, sometimes forming a grid, sometimes a concentric, interior rectangular set, and other times only a few pillars. Sometimes pillars define a front porch. The second wooden layer, joined to the upper portions of columns or to beams that cross the columns, is the bracket set layer. Last is the roof frame, the part of the building that supports rafters and roof tiles (figure i.7).

i.2. Hall of Spiritual Favors, Changling, tomb of the Yongle emperor, Changping, Beijing suburbs, ca. 1424

Below and above these three networks of wooden pieces, building components are made of other materials. The base of a Chinese building, the part that interfaces wood above it and earth below, ideally is made of nonrotting material, expensive stone such as marble for an eminent structure and brick or occasionally ceramic tile for a more humble one, and rammed earth when funds are limited. Only rarely are columns implanted directly into the ground. In more expensive buildings, columns are placed into pilasters rather than directly into a podium. A multilayer building foundation can be a sign of a structure’s eminence.

The roof also defines a Chinese building. The roof, of course, is the protective cover for the interior. It is equally a decorative feature that displays a building’s rank but not its function. Most often the Chinese roof is covered with ceramic tiles, glazed for more important buildings. Golden roof tiles and ornaments along the roof ridges are reserved for the most important buildings, both imperial and religious. Usually roofs of China’s most important buildings are hipped, sometimes with a second or even third set of eaves below the main roof. More than twenty styles of roof were used in pre-twentieth-century China.

A comparison between the stick-figure frames in figure i.6 and the Hall of Supreme Harmony or Hall of Spiritual Favors (see figures i.1, i.2) is a dramatic indication of how straightforward it is to erect a Chinese building, even a highly elaborated one. It is an equally emphatic presentation of the fact that the most significant differences between figures i.1 and i.4 are the number of repeated building units, courtyards around them, and decoration. How is it possible that emperors who could afford anything and had a limitless labor force continued to live in timber-frame buildings that differed from humble temples or dwellings of their most lowly subjects only in the amount of wood used and expense of materials that adorned them? This is a field-defining question of Chinese architecture.

i.3. Timber Pagoda, Ying county, Shanxi, 1056

i.4. Qingliang Monastery, Yuncheng county, Shanxi, Main Hall repaired in second decade of fourteenth century

i.5. Buddhist paradise, Mogao cave 217, Dunhuang, Tang period

i.6. Six combinations of pillars, beams, struts, purlins, and rafters, the modular components of a timber frame

Some might say that a profound reverence for the past, for the building system of the ancestors, drove decisions to preserve patterns of antiquity in much later buildings. Continuing along this line of thinking, one should be reminded that Chinese painting, too, has a long history of imitation, in part because old masters were revered and in part because painters learned by copying their predecessors. Painters, however, were not anonymous, and some were recognized as masters. The names of thousands of Chinese painters and their works are recorded from the fourth century onward. Moreover, it is easy to demonstrate that pre-twentieth-century Chinese painting broke from its past much more dramatically, much earlier, and intentionally, compared to architecture, and the cleavages occurred long before the contacts with the world outside that were to ignite changes in Chinese buildings. The major difference between painting and architecture is that a painting on silk or paper can be made in private, rolled up, put aside, or hidden. A building requires large sums of money and land, whether a family house, an emperor’s palace, or an imperial or village monastery; bringing any of these to completion required an organized labor force. When a Chinese emperor built a palace or a villager contributed to a temple, history confirmed that those structures would outlive the patrons. The decision to build as China had in the past, in any century as recently as the twenty-first, was conscious and, in the case of the imperial monuments of Beijing, also political.

An aspect of the political impact of China’s clearly recognizable architecture is that it is always recognizable out of context, and the portable wooden pieces make it readily exportable. Anyone aspiring to make reference to China, from an admiring emperor of Japan in the eighth century who sought to model his nation after East Asia’s most powerful example of statehood (Tang China), to William Chambers, who designed the China pavilion in Kew Gardens in the eighteenth century as a reference to exotic places of the Orient eyed as potential colonies by the British empire, could accomplish that symbol through wooden posts and ceramic tile roofs, or clear imitations of them in other materials. The simplicity and clarity of the model have meant that China has been able to maintain this profound emblem of its civilization across far more than the 4,000 kilometers of the Asian continent that have constituted its empire through history. Part of the success of the Chinese architectural system is that its modular components render archetypes such as the bracket set and the ceramic tile roof, or the one tall building, the pagoda, that readily lend themselves to imitation. China and architecture are the dominant messages of countless buildings for a multiplicity of purposes in China and in locations far beyond.

Reliance on past models and modularity are as important on a larger scale as well. Just as the Hall of Supreme Harmony is the archetypical individual structure, the Forbidden City in which it is central is the archetypical building complex. The eight fundamental features of Chinese spatial arrangement are present there. First is the horizontal axis. The primary axis is usually north-south, and the most important buildings are positioned on it. In figure i.1 we see north-south axial lines of buildings parallel to the axis of the Hall of Supreme Harmony, and we also observe buildings on perpendicular east-west axes. Spatial magnitude is expressed by longer and longer lines along horizontal planes, not vertically, for space requires ownership of land, so that someone with wealth can exhibit that wealth by more and more one-story buildings. Tall buildings, even with ceramic tile roofs, often look unnatural in a Chinese courtyard setting (figure i.8), for the second feature is that Chinese architecture, with the exception of the pagoda, which came to China as a foreign import from India, not only is one-story, it is human-sized. The height of columns across the front facade of the Hall of Supreme Harmony is about 8.43 meters, a mere five times the height of a man who would stand alongside them in an arcade.

i.7. Three timber layers of a Chinese structure: pillars, bracket sets, and roof frame

The courtyard is the third fundamental feature of Chinese space. In this spatial world dominated by four-sided enclosure, south, the orientation of the Forbidden City, is the cardinal direction. Sometimes buildings stand on four sides of a courtyard, other times three; but the fourth face is always implied. In these courtyards enclosed by walls or covered corridors, the most important buildings are often arranged in a capital-I-shaped formation, known as the gong plan, named after the Chinese character gong 工. It has been reserved for the most eminent architecture in China since the second millennium BCE.

Fourth, every Chinese building complex has one focal structure, but no building stands in isolation. Implicit in the name of a building type, such as palace (gong), is that it is part of an architectural complex of interrelated buildings, courtyards, and enclosing arcades. Gugong, literally former palace, is the Chinese name of the entire Forbidden City. Individual Chinese temples, Buddhist or Daoist, are part of a group of buildings that in this book are referred to as monasteries when monks were resident or as temple complexes.

Gates are the fifth feature. They are fundamental structures of any Chinese building complex—palatial, religious, funerary, or vernacular. Gates may be freestanding or attached to walls. They are psychological as much as physical structures. Like the enclosing spaces to which they may join, gates mark the boundary between more sanctified or imperial space behind them and the profane world in front or outside.

The sixth feature is modularity, as important in building complexes as it is in individual buildings. Whereas a piece of a bracket set or dimension of a column or bay may guide the rest of the measurements in a building, in the Forbidden City the width of the Back Halls behind the Hall of Supreme Harmony cluster is half the width of the Three Great (or Front) Halls that include the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Almost all imperial building complexes in Beijing are based on modular dimensions.

Rank, the seventh feature, is as much an aspect of building complexes as it is of individual structures. Just as the roof and its decoration indicate a building’s rank, the positioning of buildings according to formations such as the gong plan signify a complex’s importance.

The final feature of Chinese space is privacy. It is achieved by four-sided enclosure and by gates. The private space, sometimes a garden, is where one may find a pavilion or other structure that breaks out of the standardized, modular system. Private space and its architecture are visible only to a select, personal audience.

Siting, sometimes referred to as Chinese geomancy, a translation of fengshui, may also be considered a feature of Chinese space. The most difficult to articulate, implicit in the initial selection of a building site, is that it be in accord with the natural forces, specifically mountains and water. Often protective mountains, sometimes just artificial hills, are at the back of imperial construction, and often a water source is in front or runs through it.

And so the Forbidden City and countless smaller, less elaborate Chinese buildings have symbolized China and been replicated for millennia. That many of those buildings survive in Beijing is in part because the city has been a Chinese capital almost continuously since the tenth century. Xi’an, known historically as Chang’an, was a primary capital for more than five hundred years. Luoyang and Nanjing have histories as capitals that are as long. These four cities are the locations of nearly all the buildings discussed in certain chapters of this book.

i.8. Jueshan Monastery, Lingqiu, Shanxi, ca. eleventh century

Upon the establishment of the People’s Republic on October 1, 1949, archaeology became a state-sponsored enterprise that made it possible to write China’s early architectural history. Until then, the study of architecture before ca. 800 relied heavily on extrapolation based on architecture above ground and facsimiles of architecture on a small scale or in the form of painting (see figure i.5). The most famous tomb in China, in Lintong, today a suburb of Xi’an, which belongs to the First Emperor, is one of hundreds of excavated sites through which the more than seven thousand years of Chinese architectural history are written. This very early architectural history, which could not have been written seventy years ago, is more detailed than it was twenty years ago, and is most likely to be altered by new discoveries in the next decade, is where we begin.

CHAPTER 1

Genesis of Chinese Buildings and Cities

The date of the earliest evidence of architecture or urbanism in China is determined by one’s definition of a building or a city. The physical evidence of cities is earlier than evidence of individual buildings, probably because buildings were made of perishable materials whereas city walls were constructed of rammed earth. Urbanism in China begins by the sixth millennium BCE. The evidence of city building for the next four millennia is primarily archaeological, with a wall the defining feature of a Chinese city. This physical definition is reflected in the translation of the Chinese character cheng as both wall and city. When a wall is found, Chinese archaeologists assume that it signifies a group settlement. Walls were erected earlier in China than in any other part of East or South Asia but so far do not predate Jericho’s tenth millennium BCE wall.

Chinese texts also offer a terse but clear statement about the earliest architecture: In the remote past, (man) dwelt in caves or lived on open land. Commentators explain its meaning as, In the remote past, ancient rulers did not have palace halls. In the winter, they built caves, and in the summer, they erected nests.¹ The reference to rulers (wang) is because the source is a text of China’s classical age that focuses on the life of the elite. The significant aspect of this statement for architecture is the use of verbs that translate as built or erected: altering the landscape with architecture is a concept as old as the human realization of a need for shelter. Equally significant is that today, earth-sheltered dwellings and residential architecture raised on stilts are still used in China (see figures 16.14, 16.16). This is the first example of a Chinese building practice with a multimillennial history. Some date cave dwelling hundreds of thousands of years earlier than evidence of urbanism. Here we begin with the archaeological record of the sixth millennium BCE.

Cities and Buildings before Written Records

Group settlements of extended families or larger units in which hunting, fishing, gathering, or planting may have been shared predate the formation or construction of cities in China by several millennia. Walled settlements whose inhabitants used stone implements and buried their dead in cemeteries trace to the sixth millennium BCE. A village in Li county, Hunan province, on the Yangzi River, had an earthen wall, 6 meters wide at the base that narrowed to about 1.5 meters at the top, roughly rectangular in shape, about 200 meters east to west and 160 meters north to south. The wall was enclosed by a ditch, perhaps anticipating the moats that would become standard in Chinese cities for the rest of the premodern period.² Several thousand kilometers to the northeast, in Aohanqi, Inner Mongolia, a ditch, but without wall remains, encompasses another settlement of similar size dated 6200–5400 BCE. Residential buildings there are believed to have been arranged in rows.³ Remains of more complex settlements, also without walls, are in Wuyang county of Henan province in North Central China where 9 pottery kilns, 10 sacrificial dog burials, 32 urn burials, 45 building foundations, 349 tombs, 370 ash pits, and thousands of other objects including a wind instrument were found at a site dated 7000–5800 BCE.⁴ Semisubterranean communal dwellings from the fifth millennium BCE were discovered at Dadiwan in Gansu, China’s westernmost province. The site is more than a square kilometer, with several hundred residential foundations uncovered by the early twenty-first century. Foundation 901, a rectangular space oriented 30 degrees northeast, had a circular fire pit for cooking, with symmetrically positioned rooms on three sides. Two large pillars supported by pilasters were in the central area, right and left behind the fire pit. In front was an entryway or porch, a feature of other Dadiwan structures that is believed to signify residential architecture. That small area may have connected the pillar-supported, rectangular structure directly in front of it. The configuration of the main chamber with small rooms along its perimeter anticipates construction known as palaces at Erlitou from the second millennium BCE, discussed below. Connected large and small rectangular halls may anticipate gong plans of later time (figure 1.1). Floors of some of the Dadiwan foundations were painted.⁵

Dadiwan is a site whose artifacts identify it as belonging to Yangshao Culture, one of the major cultures of Neolithic China. Like most Chinese cultures of the period, it is named for a village (Yangshao) where numerous, representative examples of its pottery and other artifacts were excavated in 1921.⁶ Settlement began at China’s most famous preliterate site, Banpo, also an example of Yangshao Culture, in Shaanxi province, just east of Xi’an, in the fifth millennium BCE. Those remains have guided our understanding of Yangshao Culture since the 1950s. By the fourth millennium BCE, Banpo included houses of at least three sizes, three cemeteries, a pottery workshop, and animal pens (figure 1.2).⁷ Banpo is often compared with the 50,000-square-meter nearby site Jiangzhai, in Lintong county of Shaanxi, where some 120 residential foundations were found. Jiangzhai is completely excavated; Banpo is still largely underground.⁸ A nearly circular wall, surrounded by a moat, enclosed a Yangshao settlement in Zhengzhou, Henan province, dated 3300–2800 BCE. The wall was framed by wooden planks between which earth was pounded into layers. Like the moat, walls of pounded layers of earth (hangtu) would be used in Chinese city construction well into the second millennium CE. One cannot conclude that circular settlements were preferred at this time, nor that the suggestion of a round enclosure anticipates ritual architecture that would stand several millennia later in China, but Chengtoushan in Li county, Hunan, also was enclosed by a circular wall and moat (figure 1.3a).⁹ Approximately 300 meters in diameter, Chengtoushan’s wall was 28.6 meters at the base and 20 meters thick at the top, to a height of between 5 and 6 meters. The walls are thicker than those at any other known settlement in Asia at the time.

1.1. Plan of main chamber, with fire pit in center of room with two interior pillars and rooms on three sides, connected by corridor to smaller room with complete grid of pillars in front, foundation 901, Dadiwan, Qin’an county, Gansu

1.2. Reconstruction of moat-enclosed sector of Banpo showing Great House and residences with pyramidal and circular roof. On display in Banpo Museum in 1983

1.3. Plans of Neolithic Chinese cities: a. Circular plan of Chengtoushan, Li county, Hunan province, 3300–2800 BCE. b. Squarish plan of Pingliangtai, Huaiyang, Henan, third millennium BCE

The contemporary city Pingliangtai, in Huaiyang, Henan province, is the earliest evidence of a squarish city, an idealized shape that would be associated with Chinese rulers in later millennia (figure 1.3b).¹⁰ Only 185 meters on each side, Pingliangtai has two other features that would be part of many future Chinese imperial capitals: a prominent entry was at the center of its southern wall; it was approached from the south by an avenue that continued northward, to divide the city into eastern and western sections. Pottery drainpipes excavated at Pingliangtai confirm that China had an underground drainage system at the same time as the ancient South Asian city Mohenjo-daro.

Hemudu in Yuyao county of Zhejiang province, 22 kilometers northwest of Ningbo, flourished earlier and is the only site from this period that has wooden remains. The 40,000-square-meter site yielded pieces of notched timbers that would have been used in post-and-lintel construction, making it perhaps the most important location for the study of Neolithic Chinese wood joinery (figure 1.4). Remains are dated 5000–3200 BCE. Hemudu had a flourishing rice-growing culture more than six thousand years ago, with a population that raised pigs, water buffalo, and dogs. They used bows, arrows, and whistles, hunted and fished, made pottery vessels, and carved in bone and ivory. The largest structure with a wooden foundation was 160 square meters in base perimeter.¹¹

Hemudu marks a dramatic change that occurred by the third millennium BCE across China: size. Cities served populations that spread as many as 90 kilometers in more than one direction from the center. Taosi in Xiangfen, southern Shanxi, is an example. Three million square meters (approximately 1.2 square miles) with multiple walled areas and a 30,000-square-meter cemetery, Taosi is a precursor or a very early example of the urban center around which a state and in which a society organized. The pattern would continue in China for several more millennia and would be described in writing by the first century CE. The second aspect of size as an agenda of construction in third millennium BCE China is the great house (Dafangzi), shown in the reconstruction of Banpo (see figure 1.2). Dafangzi is a Chinese term used to designate a structure significantly larger than others in the same settlement. Dafangzi are usually understood as palatial or ceremonial space. One thereby further assumes a kingly and/or priestly class. Dafangzi, especially in mid-twentieth-century Chinese writing that seeks to understand Chinese architecture in the context of contemporary society, is sometimes interpreted as a communal space. A Dafangzi also is believed to have existed at Hemudu.

Some of the most impressive buildings and cities in third millennium BCE China are associated with the Neolithic culture known as Longshan. More than fifty walled Longshan settlements from this period have been uncovered along the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers. Since its discovery in the 1920s, China’s most famous Longshan city has been at Chengziya(i) in Zhangqiu county, Shandong province. Dated ca. 2600 BCE, the pounded-earthen wall was an irregular rectangle, roughly 445 by 540 meters. The wall had 10-meter sides at the base and was about 5 meters wide at the top; today parts stand to a height of about 7 meters.¹²

Shimao, a late Longshan site in Shenmu county of Shaanxi, on the Yellow River near today’s border with Inner Mongolia, is likely to surpass Chengziya in important information about both Longshan Culture and the period just after it.¹³ Dated ca. 2000–1700 BCE, Shimao is the largest walled city of the period so far in China, and one of the most heavily fortified. Oriented roughly southward, its stone walls, the earliest evidence of this feature in China, enclose an area of 4 square kilometers with corner towers and the earliest evidence of fortified projections out from the city wall known in later China as mamian, literally horse faces. Gates are huge: the east gate stands on 2,500 square meters of space. In contrast to the wall, the gates, towers, and mamian are made of tightly packed, pounded earthen layers and then faced with stone. Oriented roughly north-south, Shimao divides into eastern and western sectors (figure 1.5). Traces of paint indicate that Shimao has some of the earliest evidence of murals in China.

Northern and southern walls, each about 500 meters in length, a 353-meter eastern wall, and north and south gates of a nearly south-oriented city were uncovered at Guchengzhai in Henan province. One exceptionally large building, presumably a Dafangzi, and other residential architecture were found as well. Its area was 176,500 square meters. Walls and building foundations were made using the rammed-earth technique. Guchengzhai is a late Longshan settlement, dated ca. 2000 BCE.¹⁴

A large, high mound of which more than 7 meters remain in Niuheliang, Liaoning province, an example of Hongshan Culture (ca. 4700–2900 BCE), is known as Female Spirit Temple because statue pieces believed to be female were uncovered there. Stone platforms and burial mounds were found above jade and other expensive materials.¹⁵ In South China at Yaoshan, in Yuhang district of Hangzhou, and other sites where Liangzhu Culture (ca. 3300–2300 BCE) is present, altars and jade objects that attest to ceremonies have been excavated. The walled area around Yaoshan was 1,500–1,700 meters east to west by 1,800–1,900 meters north to south.¹⁶ By the early twenty-first century, two gates had been found in each of the north, east, and south walls. Examples of the light-green-white jade named Liangzhu Jade because of this location have been excavated at tombs in the vicinity since the 1930s. The most intriguing structure in Yaoshan is the man-made mound 4 meters high and about 3,000 square meters in area. Eleven rectangular graves are exposed on it today (figure 1.6). It is believed to be a ritual altar. Evidence indicates that Liangzhu Culture communities were supported by rice growing in the third millennium BCE.

The Yaoshan burials have been used as evidence of ancestor worship.¹⁷ Whether or not ancestors were the purpose of construction, remains at Niuheliang also support the idea that an altar and thus ritual were part of the Chinese building tradition before the third millennium BCE. Dafangzi, as mentioned above, also may have been related to rituals.

1.4. Notched timbers, excavated at Hemudu, Zhejiang, ca. fifth millennium BCE

1.5. Remains of east gate, outer wall, Shimao, Shenmu, Shaanxi, 2000–1700 BCE

1.6. Likely altar with graves, Yaoshan, Yuhang, Zhejiang

Before 3000 BCE, then, there is evidence of architecture and urbanism all over China: Hunan, Liaoning, Henan, Gansu, Shaanxi, Zhejiang, and Inner Mongolia, Southwest, Northeast, West, and Central China on today’s map. All the remains indicate that by 3000 BCE, terre pisé (rammed-earthen) walled settlements enclosed by drainage canals with systematically arranged residential architecture, cemeteries, and sometimes workshops existed across China, and that wooden pillars were the primary support system for buildings.

By the end of the third millennium BCE, large settlements had overshadowed villages. Timber framing was a technology of construction. Walls and building foundations were made of rammed earth; mud-earth and sun-dried bricks also were used for buildings, sometimes to fill in walls of the timber frame, and stone also was used for walls and altars. Whitewash and other forms of paint covered surfaces. Tombs and workshops, including kilns and areas designated for handicrafts, were part of Neolithic cities and smaller settlements. Great Houses suggest communal hierarchy, perhaps the notion of centrality (not enough is known about their locations to confirm this), and perhaps ceremonial altars or other spaces. These features have been found throughout the regions that would unite as China approximately 2,500 years later.

Cities and Buildings of the Bronze Age

The entry into the second millennium BCE is coincident with the period sometimes known as the Xia dynasty (ca. 2070–ca. 1600 BCE). Shang (ca. 1600–1046 BCE), more widely accepted as a dynasty, follows. The manufacture of bronze objects predates Shang, and the pictographic writing system develops during it. China’s most important architectural remains of Xia and Shang are along the Yellow River, much of it in Henan province.

Erlitou in Yanshi county, Henan, is on the Luo River, which runs through the city of Luoyang on the western side. Excavation began at the 4-square-kilometer site in 1959. There were at least four phases of occupation at Erlitou from ca. 1900 to ca. 1500. The largest of all contemporary sites in China, by the early twenty-first century Erlitou was understood as the core of a culture descended from Longshan that spread across western Henan and southern Shanxi, and if there were a Xia dynasty, finds at Erlitou could define it. Some believe Erlitou was a Xia capital.¹⁸ Its architecture, as well as bronze vessels of the shapes known as jue, ding, and he, bronze plaques inlaid with turquoise, carved jade and bone, lacquer, shells, and pottery attest to the complexity of life at Erlitou. The turquoise is believed to have been local and thus not evidence of trade with other regions.

The population of Erlitou at its peak is estimated at eighteen thousand to thirty thousand.¹⁹ An area with more than thirty building foundations is known as the palace-temple complex. In the early years of excavation, building foundations of rammed earth were assumed to be palaces, but the presence of tombs designated as belonging to elite members of this society because of the objects found in them raises the possibility that some of the structures were for ritual. Among seven large sets of remains identified by the 2010s are three features that would be present through the next four millennia of Chinese architectural history: building complexes labeled by excavators as palaces (gong) are oriented toward the south; each has a pillar-supported structure divided into interior rooms near the center and facing south inside a much larger enclosed courtyard; and a gate sits in the south-enclosing arcade or wall (figure 1.7). The principles mentioned in the introduction—main buildings along a north-south axial line, four-sided enclosure, and the importance of gates—thus were in place here.

By 1600 the dynasty known in Chinese texts as Shang was underway. Characterized by bronze vessels made with ceramic piece molds and decorated with motifs sometimes known as taotie or shoumian wen (animalistic or beast-faced patterns), the early Shang dynasty is known in architecture for huge cities. Like Erlitou of ca. 1700 BCE, the largest cities dated after ca. 1600 have often been identified as Shang capitals. The preeminent historian of Chinese archaeology of the twentieth century, Kwang-chih (K. C.) Chang, believed that the Shang dynasty had sacred capitals whose locations did not change and auxiliary capitals that did. In ca. 1600 enormous walled cities were built in Henan. They represent Erligang Culture.²⁰ The Shang city wall beneath the modern city Zhengzhou in Henan, for example, was 6,960 meters in perimeter and between 20 and 32 meters wide at the base. Eleven gaps in the wall probably are the locations of gates. The wall was built with a technique known as banzhu in which earth was rammed between wooden planks. The sections of earth were about 3.8 meters high (figure 1.8). More than twenty palatial building foundations were excavated in the north center and northeastern sectors of the city in an area of around 800 meters east to west by 500 meters north to south. A foundation of about 2,000 square meters divided into nine rooms served as the Dafangzi or its Shang-period successor. Excavation confirms that human sacrifice was performed in the northern section of the Shang city.

1.7. Reconstruction of palace 1, Erlitou, Yanshi, Henan Luoyang Museum 1986 and 2005

1.8. Remains of walled city, Erligang period, Zhengzhou, Henan

The Shang city sometimes known as Yanshi after the county in which is it located, and other times as Shixianggou (Shixiang ditch) because of the drainage canal that runs through it, is in the same county that today includes Erlitou. Shixianggou had multiple walled sectors. The outer wall was only one-tenth the size of the contemporary Erligang-period city in Zhengzhou. Shixianggou had seven outer-wall gates. An inner city of 740 by 1,100 meters shared the southern wall and southern sections of the eastern and western walls of the outer city. At its center was a palatial sector that can be called a palace-city (gongcheng), approximately 200 meters square. Building foundations were positioned symmetrically on the east and west. The walls of the three cities, outer, inner, and palace, were 16–25, 6–7, and 2 meters in thickness, respectively (figure 1.9). The outer wall was surrounded by a moat of 20 meters in width. Sacrificial burials and an underground drainage system confirm this as a model example of Erligang (early Shang) urbanism, and there surely was a palace-city; but the small size has led to suggestions that a major purpose of this city might have been defense rather than a royal center.²¹ A small city would be much easier to defend, and Yanshi’s very narrow gates may further support the idea that the construction sought to make entry as difficult as possible. It is also possible that Shixianggou was built by conquerors right after the conquest of Xia at Erlitou.

1.9. Plan of Shang city at Yanshi, Henan, ca. 1600 BCE

Palatial foundations at Shixianggou confirm that the buildings they upheld were planned according to the same principles observed at Erlitou: a main structure supported by columns on its exterior was divided into interior rooms; an enclosing structure, perhaps a pillared arcade, contained the courtyard in front of it; a gate was centrally positioned in the front part of the enclosure, at a place that formed an axial line near the center of the back chamber.

Erligang Culture spread from the Yellow to the Yangzi River. Since 1954 Panlongcheng, in Hubei province, has been the most important example of Erligang architecture and one of the most important sources of bronze vessels outside Henan province before the year 1300 BCE. Located 450 kilometers south of Zhengzhou, about 5 kilometers from Hubei’s largest city, Wuhan, the 75,000-square-meter wall (about 290 by 260 meters) that enclosed the Shang city in Hubei was roughly four-sided, with water flowing around all but the northwestern corner and probably with a gate in each wall face. Three large building foundations have been excavated inside the walled area and 38 tombs, among which 350 bronze vessels were found, are outside the walls. One of those tombs is the largest Erligang tomb known.²²

The outer wall of the city at Panlongcheng is made by the same technique used at the Zhengzhou city: layers of rammed earth were packed between and around wooden planks, with the widest base thickness 45 meters and the narrowest surviving part at the top, 18 meters. Intramural architecture, however, suggests a more complicated building arrangement than can yet be verified at other Erligang sites or at Erlitou. Structures known as foundations 1 and 2 are positioned in front and back of each other in an enclosure to which they are attached by side arcades. A gate is at the central front. In reconstruction, the complex not only confirms the axial arrangement of major buildings, use of a front central gate, and four-sided enclosure around courtyards, it anticipates arrangements of imperial and other eminent space in China such as the original configuration of Back Halls of the Forbidden City (figure 1.10). Panlongcheng’s tombs are rectangular pits. Some had a feature known as yaokeng (waist pit), an additional pit below the main burial area that usually contained one or more sacrificial human or animal corpses. Yaokeng are associated almost exclusively with Erligang burials.²³

When a single, clearly important example exists, in this case a front-and-back-hall arrangement that anticipates a building configuration employed by Chinese emperors 3,500 years later, it is noteworthy. A second example of the same arrangement makes it possible to consider whether the configuration was a style of the period. A nearly square, rammed-earth wall, 300– 310 meters on each face, uncovered in the 1990s at Fucheng, in Jiaozuo county, Henan, is such a site. The wall enclosed a building foundation with two south-oriented halls in front and back of each other, important evidence that front and back halls were the focus of a city sector, even on this small scale, in the middle of the second millennium BCE.²⁴ A slightly larger city in Yuanqu county of Shanxi, whose four wall segments were between 336 and 400 meters in length, had a palatial sector just east of the center of the enclosure.²⁵ The arrangement of buildings is not clear enough to support the front-and-back-palaces concept. The bottoms of the outer wall were less than half the thickness of their counterparts at Erligang, but portions along the south and west were double that size. The palace was roughly in the center. The sizes of the cities in Jiaozuo and Yuanqu have led to the suggestion that they may have been military outposts of Shang capitals in Zhengzhou or Yanshi.

Shang China’s most important city and presumably, therefore, the location of Shang China’s most sophisticated architecture, was the last capital, sometimes referred to as Yinxu (ruins of Yin), today in Anyang, Henan. Whereas some still dispute whether the ruins in Zhengzhou and Yanshi are of previous primary capitals of the Shang, there is no question that the ruler named Pan Geng moved the capital to this place in Anyang or that it endured there for 274 years until the fall of the Shang dynasty. Excavation began in 1928 under the direction of Li Chi (pronounced Li Ji) and others. The ruins of massive pit tombs, with approach ramps from north and south, and sometimes also from east and west, gained immediate international attention. Excavation at the Shang site in Anyang has occurred every year since 1928 except for the period 1937–1949.

The last Shang capital flourished from about 1300 to about 1050 BCE. The Anyang core spanned about 36 square kilometers on either side of the Huan River, and the settlements that formed a network around it spread even farther in all directions. Among the remains are thousands of tombs and yet more thousands of sacrificial burials, and thousands of artifacts in bronze, bone, ivory, jade, stone, pottery, and horn, and even a few fragments of painting. A walled sector of about 4 square kilometers that includes some of the earliest ruins, all from stage one of the four stages into which remains have been divided, is north of the Huan River. So far, a wall around the entire city cannot be confirmed.²⁶

The area of Anyang known as Xiaotun, named after the village where it was uncovered in the 1930s, is due south and west of the Huan River, with a moat enclosing it on its other two sides. It extends about 1,100 meters north to south and about 600 meters east to west. Fifty-three large, rammed-earth foundations comprise the most important palatial-ritual sector whose buildings divide into three groups, the first with fifteen foundations (100 by 90 meters), the second with twenty-one foundations (200 by 100 meters), and the third with seventeen foundations (50 by 35 meters). The first group includes a building that was 46.7 meters long, and the second group has an 85-meter-long foundation. Both were long and narrow, 10.7 and 14.5 meters wide, respectively. The Xiaotun excavations are also the source of thousands of oracle bones, turtle plastrons, and bovine scapulae that were burned and, based on the cracks, used for divinations, sometimes with the inscriptions of the prognostication on the bones.²⁷

The tomb of Lady Hao (Fu Hao), consort of King Wu Ding (ca. 1250–1192 BCE), is south of the Huan River, about 100 meters northwest of Xiaotun. A simple pit tomb of 5.6 by 4 meters and 7.5 meters deep, and showing no signs of robbery when it was excavated in 1976, it contained bronze vessels on which the occupant’s name was inscribed. The inscriptions confirmed information about her life known through other records, including oracle bone inscriptions, found elsewhere in Anyang. Architectural remains on top of the tomb may be from a ritual or sacrificial hall. Sixteen sacrificial burials were found in the pit. Nearly two thousand objects, including more than two hundred bronze vessels and nearly six hundred jades, were uncovered.

More than one hundred medium-sized tombs and about four thousand small tombs had been excavated among the Shang Anyang ruins by the early twenty-first century. Medium-sized tombs contained as many as eight sacrificial burials, but small tombs contained a single corpse, often in a coffin of about 2 square meters at the base. There were, in addition, thousands of pits of sacrificial burials, evidence of this practice often in the form of decapitated or dismembered skeletal pieces. Excavations document more than ten thousand sacrificial burials in the centuries the Shang capital flourished in Anyang.²⁸

1.10. Theoretical reconstruction of palatial complex at Panlongcheng, Huangpi, Hubei, ca. 1400 BCE

1.11. Royal Tomb no. 1001 from cemetery at Xibeigang, Anyang, Henan ca. thirteenth century BCE

The royal cemetery of the Anyang capital, at the site known as Xibeigang, is one of the extraordinary necropolises of the second millennium BCE (figure 1.11). Located north of the Huan River and 1.5 kilometers from Xiaotun, it contains thirteen tombs, seven of them in all likelihood housing the kings from Wu Ding to Di Yi, and an unfinished tomb perhaps intended for Di Xin, the man during whose reign the Shang fell. The tombs entered from four sides probably were for kings, and those with one or two entries probably belong to royal wives. Each tomb is more than 200 square meters, oriented northward, and has an outer coffin made of wooden planks. The tombs divide as eight on the west and five on the east, each self-contained but some sharing approach ramps or with approaches built above earlier ones. Every royal tomb had sacrificial burials, as are indicated by decapitated and dismembered parts shown on the left side of figure 1.11, some with more than two hundred, as well as sacrificed animals, inside it. In addition, the area on the eastern side of Xibeigang, where there are fewer large tombs, is filled in with sacrificial pits and individual burials.²⁹

Different parts of China entered the Bronze Age at different times, but every province and autonomous region contains evidence of Bronze Age architecture. Excavation at Aduuchuluu, in Wenquan county of Inner Mongolia, for instance, yielded large building foundations, stone tombs, and stones in the shape of horse heads, the last giving it its Mongolian name that transliterates into Chinese as Adunqiaolu.³⁰

Shang architecture lends itself to global assessments. Comparisons focus on aspects of Shang society that can be derived from cities and tombs discussed here in combination with information in oracle bone inscriptions. From the physical and written sources, Shang emerges as a hierarchical society in which rule passed from older to younger brother or father to son. The Shang worshiped Shangdi, sometimes translated as High Lord, and their own ancestors, presumably in large structures or outside. Shang society had lineages and clans, and members who held titles and ranks. It is believed that the fifty-three large building foundations at Xiaotun belonged to or were used by elite members of society. The Shang had a primary capital at any given time, but it moved in the course of the dynasty. Shang also had lesser cities and