Chinese Architecture: A History.

• Author: Ruitenbeek, K. Laas

Chinese Architecture: A History. By NANCY SHATZMAN STEINHARDT. Princeton: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019. Pp. xii + 388. S65.

Chinese architecture is inseparable from Chinese culture and, for visitors, its most visible aspect. It met with great interest in the West since at least the publication of Johan Nieuhof's richly illustrated An Embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces, to the Grand Tartar Cham, Emperor of China, 1665. Scholarly research and documentation by Western and, slightly later, Japanese and Chinese scholars began around 1900. From around 1930, the year the Society for Research in Chinese Architecture was founded with Liang Sicheng as driving force, it had largely become the domain of Chinese scholars.

Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt has researched, published, and taught about the history of Chinese architecture for over forty years. Her new book Chinese Architecture: A History is the most comprehensive work on China's unique tradition within world architecture written by a Western scholar and at the same time a summa of the knowledge and insights of a lifetime. This book should be authoritative.

China's architecture with its long history is a vast subject and writing a new history is a daunting task. Most earlier works, including the volume Chinese Architecture of 2002, edited by Steinhardt, present its basic principles and main line of development by referring to a limited number of representative examples chosen from palatial and religious architecture, with an excursion perhaps into garden and vernacular architecture.

There is a long gap between these succinct early works and Steinhardt's book of 2019, during which an enormous number of articles and monographs on individual buildings, historical cities, and excavated architectural sites have been published, largely in Chinese, as well as some excellent general histories in Chinese. The large volume Histoty and Development of Ancient Chinese Architecture, edited by Zhang Yuhuan and published in 1986 both in an English and a Chinese edition, is the only work of comparable scope to Steinhardt's new book, but with its focus on building technology, as its Chinese title Zhongguo gudai jianzhu jishu shi (History of architectural technique in ancient China) clearly indicates, it follows a different approach.

In an introduction, seventeen chronologically arranged chapters, and a conclusion Steinhardt presents the range, both geographical and typological, and historical development of Chinese architecture. As a rule, the chapters are organized around an account of the layout of (capital) cities and their walls, palaces and sacred architecture, and tombs. Within this overall framework, special themes such as the appearance of new types of buildings, new construction techniques, or transcultural phenomena such as the influence of Buddhism or Islam are dealt with in the historical periods where they fit best. Landmark buildings are presented in more detail, but it is the deliberate choice of the author to introduce many examples of sites and buildings characteristic of their type or historical period, so many that sometimes they become little more than enumerations, especially in the later chapters. But there is always a reference, and the resulting bibliography is a valuable research tool. It is arranged by chapter, which is not as practical as it seems. As the same publication may be quoted in several chapters but is listed only under the chapter where it first appears, it takes some searching to find it when it is quoted in a later chapter.

In the introduction, the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City is presented as "the identifier of China worldwide" (p. 1) and "the archetypal individual structure" (p. 5), with its high marble platform, vermilion wooden columns, complicated bracket sets, and golden ceramic tile roof, adding that wood, brick, stone, and tile are the predominant materials in Chinese construction through five millennia. Of course, they are the predominant materials in construction anywhere in the world until the mid-nineteenth century, when cast iron and concrete came in. What is specifically Chinese is the fact that all structural parts of a building are made of wood, including the columns that transfer the weight of the tiled roof to the building's plinth, so that there is no need for load bearing walls of stone or brick. Chinese architecture is, fundamentally, wood architecture, using, since at least the eleventh century CE, a modular system.

The author's statement that "wood joinery and the manipulation of timber more generally are unique aspects of Chinese architecture" (p. 1) is perhaps not strong and specific enough. The thirteenth-century oak roof of Notre Dame in Paris, destroyed by fire in April 2019, was an amazing feat of carpentry. Of course, it was hidden from view, as opposed to the fully exposed carpentry in China. Also, when looking at Greek temple architecture, which has been copied all over the world until the present day, it is clear at first sight (especially in the Doric order) that this is wood architecture translated into stone. Why this transition to stone, or petrification, happened in Greece in the sixth century BCE but never in China (except to a very limited degree in pagoda architecture) is a question a book on Chinese architecture is not obliged to speculate about. However, it should explain the principles of timber construction that result in the characteristic shapes that define a building as Chinese. Since about the sixth century, these defining shapes are inward curved roofs and upturned roof corners. Since at least this time also, usually all wooden exterior and interior parts of architecture in the grand style are brightly colored and, especially in the upper zone with bracket sets and horizontal beams, decorated with multicolored, often gilded, intricate designs. There is no other architecture in the world in which color plays such a dominant role. Although these features are visible in many of the book's illustrations, the author nowhere deals with them explicitly. They are as important, also as tools for dating buildings, as the characteristic spatial arrangement of Chinese architecture, for which the author gives a convenient list of eight.

The book's first chapter, "Genesis of Chinese Buildings and Cities," deals with neolithic settlements, including Hemudu near Ningbo with its already quite sophisticated wood joinery dating back to the fifth millennium BCE, and bronze age walled cities with palaces from pre-Shang to Warring States, that anticipate many characteristics of later Chinese architecture. The Anyang royal tombs are the earliest in an over three thousand-year-long tradition of large ruler's mausolea that ends only with Sun Yatsen's tomb of 1930--a tradition that echoes Egypt, India, and classical antiquity, but is remarkably absent in Christian Europe with its modest church burials of kings and emperors, one is tempted to add.

Chapters 2 and 3, "Architecture of the First Emperor and His Predecessors" and "Han Architecture," focus on the layout of ruler's cities and tombs, illustrated with many excavated examples of the Eastern Zhou and Warring States, and the Qin and Han capitals Xianyang, Chang'an, and Luoyang with their palaces, ritual buildings, and mausolea. A particularly fascinating site is the First Emperor's remotest traveling palace, at Shibeidi on the coast of the Bohai Sea in Liaoning, excavated in the 1990s, where uncovered ceramic tiles "confirm either that craftsmen from Xianyang worked here or that their products were sent to the coast of Liaoning Province for installation" (29). Architecture was crucial to Qin Shihuang's vision of empire, and this remained so in all later dynasties.

The author gives a typology and examples of the circa 100,000 Han tombs thought to exist, cut into rocks, built of stone, brick or large hollow tiles, and more rarely of wood. Many are vaulted, a construction that is not used in above-ground architecture, with a few very rare exceptions. For vernacular architecture there are quite abundant pictorial records and plenty of ceramic tomb models that document timber and half-timber structures. Toward the end of the Han, in the second century CE, the earliest examples of Buddhist influence from India appear. The most striking example is not mentioned: the pair of fluted columns with...