A Journey from Mountain Valleys to the Center of the Kingdom
Richard S. Wiborg
One can travel in northern China and see a rich architectural history. Our journey begins in a remote village nestled into a mountainside in Shansi province, just below Inner Mongolia. We arrive at the main temple of Foguangsi, built in 857. It is one of a precious few surviving Tang dynasty buildings, approximately 50 x 100 ft. and 45 ft. to the ridge. Like most palaces and temples, the interior of the building is one cavernous space. The roof is gray tile, and the walls are whitewashed plaster with earthy red woodwork. The roof brackets are remarkable for their size and for being the earliest example of the Lever Arm (angtou) bracket system. It is hard to imagine how carpenters cut, moved, and erected timbers for a building of such large dimensions.
From A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture, Liang Ssu-ch’eng, 1991 reprint, Taipei
From A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture, Liang Ssu-ch’eng, 1991 reprint, Taipei
Two hundred years later, in 1056 in the same region, another generation of inspired builders raised the Muta Wood Pagoda. Five stories and 200 ft. tall, it is one of the great timber-frame structures in the world. It is octagonal, 50 ft. across the base, with nine pent roofs and a full roof on top. The board footage of wood posts and beams used in this structure is a big number. There are perhaps 25,000 pieces in the bracket sets. The ground floor level beam-ends are splintered by the crushing weight of all that they carry above. On each floor groups of Buddhist statues patiently await visitors. Muta is scheduled for restoration, and it is a credit to the Chinese government that they willingly invest major resources to maintain and restore their national treasure buildings.
From A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture, Liang Ssu-ch’eng, 1991 reprint, Taipei
Datong is a bustling coal-mining center in northern Shansi. In the town are two famous temples: Shanhuasi and Huayensi. The main buildings on these temple grounds are huge edifices with remarkable bracket sets staying wide eaves. The temple halls rise above all the houses around them. You glimpse them from miles away and they seem like giant dinosaurs caught in a time-warp. People are eating Colonel Wang’s California Chicken as they ride taxis and watch television. Their lives have accelerated beyond the time of temples. Some people go to temples to worship, but most visitors are ticket-buying tourists.
ed. Li Yuming, A Panorama of Ancient Chinese Architecture in Shanxi, Taiyuen, 1986, Shanxi People’s Publishers.
From Shansi we head west to Hebei province. Dulesi, located between Beijing and Tianjing, dates from 984. The two-story Guanyinge temple is barely large enough to house one of the largest freestanding statues in China, over 50 ft. tall—the goddess Guanyin. Her eyes peer out of the second floor balcony door. The ceiling is recessed to make adequate headroom for her head and headdress. Itis common for statues and door guardians to be much taller than doorway height. Their heads almost graze the rafters, and their imposing size makes us mere humans feel puny and mortal. The main temple has survived 34 major earthquakes. We see beams and eaves sag because the temple builders pushed the timbers near their limits. Hence the wood posts which now prop up the roof corners.
From A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture, Liang Ssu-ch’eng, 1991 reprint, Taipei
Next we swing over to the center of Beijing to see the Forbidden City. It was the Ming and Ching Imperial Residence and government capital from 1420 to 1911. The Forbidden City contains within its moat and 30-ft.-tall rampart walls arguably the largest intact group of timber buildings in the world, numbering several hundred.
One gets a sense of “imperial” when ones sees the large open plazas, the marble railings, the virtuosity of triple-hipped towers, and the second largest timber building in China, the Taihedian, with its white marble, red columns, yellow glazed tile roofs, and blue, green, red, and orange painted lintels and beams. The scale of the buildings is grand, the colors dazzling. Inside, one peers into mysterious darkness. Sometimes one sniffs the fragrance of wafting incense smoke. One feels small in the presence of such wealth and power.
In one corner of the Forbidden City, carpenters climb scaffolding around a newly raised timber-frame replica of a building burnt down in 1925 by a eunuch suspected of theft. The two-story timber-frame building with a pyramid roof rests on a raised earth platform covered with unpolished granite pavers. As prescribed by Ching building regulations, it has round posts, large beams with rounded edges joined with triangulating diagonal beams at the corners, bracket clusters, round common and fan rafters which carry square flying rafters, segmented hip beams, and varied roof pitch.
Around the site these days, carpenters use the ink-line for snapping layout lines on timber posts and beams, and dangle the ink-pot by its string as a plumb bob for sighting vertical lines on round post-ends. They also fabricate gates, doors, windows, and lattices. We see large and small frame saws, push planes, hammers, chisels, gouges, and adzes. Painters will cover every visible inch of wood, first with tung oil, then with paint made from natural ground pigments, stone powder and pig’s blood as the binder. They will do special fancy decorative patterns on lintels.
Roofers lay down a bed of mud, fair it into a graceful curve, and then lay interlocking convex and concave tiles that abut the curving hip ridges, which are capped with different tiles. They tie a stone onto the end of a string and hang the string from the ridge, then sight along the string when they set the roof tiles in order to achieve a straight line. (Concave and overlapping convex tiles are laid in vertical rows from eave to ridge, starting from the eave. The concave tiles act as a gutter to funnel water down the roof. The convex tiles shed water into the concave “drains.” Tiles are bedded in mud on top of wood plank roof sheathing. The drooping string makes a straight line that the roofer can sight when placing tile courses up the roof in the mud bed.)
Other workers will lay fired floor tiles, and lay and plaster brick infill walls. On opening day, this building will be reborn as the youngest sibling in the distinguished and ancient family of Chinese architecture.