Chapter 11 8.architectural historian

Chinese hatred and humiliation at the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in September 1931 inspired a long-lasting national boycott of Japanese goods.Students and businessmen led the boycott, but widespread participation sparked a new wave of patriotism across the country. This is really a mockery of fate. Sicheng, who had a particularly happy childhood in Japan, also suffered the first serious blow of his adult life from Japan.Ironically, it was the brutish pressure from the hated Japanese military that cut short his start to a promising career as a busy architect and teacher, forcing him to seek a similar new career.

When he left Shenyang, Sicheng had already accepted a position in a little-known small unit in Beijing. It was the China Architecture Research Association (later changed to a research institute), and its official name was China Construction Society. It's a by-product of a rich man's hobby.Its founder was Zhu Qiqian, a contemporary of Liang Qichao.Zhu Qiqian, born in Guizhou in 1872, was an able official who held many high positions in the Chinese government during his middle age. In 1915, the President of the Republic of China ordered him to repair the Imperial Palace in Beijing as the Minister of the Interior, and restore the city gates and some ancient buildings.In overseeing these projects, he became close to the craftsmen who spent their lives maintaining these royal buildings.He learned a lot about Chinese architecture from them, and when he reached retirement age, he kept his interest and continued to study its historical development.By chance, he saw a precious manuscript "Zaofashi" in the Song Dynasty Manuscript Library of Jiangsu Province in Nanjing and printed it.Sicheng cherishes the book his father sent him very much.The author of the book, Li Jie, was the court order official at the time, responsible for overseeing the construction and restoration of government buildings.Like Zhu Qiqian, he often consulted with craftsmen who had the traditional skills of sawing wood and building houses according to official instructions, and they "explained everything to him."

The discovery of Li Jie's book prompted Zhu Qiqian to establish the China Construction Society.He gathered a group of old-fashioned scholars to search for documents on Chinese architecture from ancient books written in classical Chinese.None of these scholars had any knowledge of Chinese architecture.Zhu Qiqian himself understood that the jargon of carpenters must be "deciphered".Often these carpenters were illiterate, and their building methods were dictated from master to apprentice and kept as trade secrets. Obviously, Zhu Qiqian's research needs expert leadership.The key is to have a modern architect with knowledge of Chinese classics.Zhu Qiqian was a contemporary of Liang Qichao and knew that Liang Sicheng had just returned from studying architecture abroad.Zhu Qiqian talked to him in 1930 and suggested that he join the Architecture Society as the director of the research department.

In 1931, it was clear that the Japanese military occupation of Manchuria would not be met with resistance, and their rapid closure of the university was inevitable, and Sicheng could accept Zhu Qiqian's suggestion with peace of mind.His own enthusiasm for the study of Chinese architectural history and his confidence in his readiness for the task dispelled any doubts that might remain.He knew from the beginning that he was creating a new field of research by raising questions that others had ignored.What stages of development did Chinese architecture go through, and how can we discover them?In Clay's courses he learned about the stages of development of Western architecture.In drawing he was asked to master them, and after years of drawing at his desk, his honeymoon trips all over Europe with Whein taught them both to recognize at a glance the buildings representing the different periods they had studied things.

From the first day he joined the Institute, Liang Sicheng began to take the necessary steps to reveal the evolutionary process of Chinese architecture.He knew that the difficulty lay in finding relatively well-preserved early ancient buildings.A more pressing problem is to find as far as possible earlier buildings too old to survive into the twentieth century to establish a basic thread. Zhu Qiqian established the headquarters of his research institute in the abandoned corner of Tiananmen Square.Presumably his longstanding official connections helped him secure such privileges for his projects.Sicheng set up his office there and immediately started an in-depth study of "Zaoshu Fashi".At this stage.Zhu Qiqian's knowledge of different editions of "Zao Fa Shi" must have been useful to him.However, in the eyes of practicing architects like Liang Sicheng, Zhu Qiqian's generation of scholars is very accustomed to insisting on words.He needed to know the shape and properties of the wood that Li Jie called in weird technical terms. The illustrations for the 1925 edition have been misinterpreted by everyone as an explanation of a text that has been somewhat incomplete for hundreds of years.Sicheng's research on "Zaofashi" has been intermittent in the following years, although he believes that the treasures he extracted from the book are "irrefutable".

Since Sicheng started his new career as an architectural historian, he was determined to find and discover the "grammar" of Chinese architecture.Throughout Chinese history, he recognized that wooden frames were the basic form of Chinese architecture.The Great Wall and many of the walls are filled with mud and bricks are placed on the surface, as are the tombs with barrel vaults made of brick or stone.But those lesser free-standing monumental buildings built of more durable materials, such as pagodas, are generally direct imitations of timber-frame buildings.Sicheng was eager to learn about the construction principles of Chinese wood-frame buildings and how this construction method has evolved over the past three thousand years.

In 1932, Japanese archaeologists Tokiwa and Sekino, who Liang Sicheng had studied at Harvard for his atlas, published related text volumes, reporting their archaeological travels in rural China.Before this, Sicheng himself had no experience of traveling in the countryside, but when he read about the discovery of sculptures in Liao Dynasty temples in Datong in northern Shanxi by the Japanese and about the construction of Songshan Mountain in northern Henan in 1125 (about the same time as "Zao Fa Shi") ), I was very excited when I described the small nun's nunnery Chuzu's nunnery.The French sinologist Pelliot had just published a collection of photographs of murals he had found in Buddhist caves in Dunhuang, in the far northwest of China.From studying images of buildings in these books and other publications (especially the Tang Dynasty temples in Nara, Japan), Liang Sicheng was able to draw some conclusions about Tang Dynasty architecture, ground design, building types, temple plans, roofs, and Assumptions for the base platform of the building, etc.

Sicheng's first article was published in the "Hui Kan" of the architectural society published in March 1932, which was designed to collect existing documents about temples and houses in the Tang Dynasty.From the beginning of the article, he hoped to find a surviving wooden frame building built in the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD).His article marks a course of action that he has identified towards this goal.He probably won't succeed, because time has passed a thousand years and wood is a fragile material.Even protected by broad, overhanging tile roofs, wooden posts and trusses were vulnerable to moth, corrosion, and fire.Maybe man is the worst enemy.Religious persecution of Buddhism periodically wiped out monks and destroyed the huge buildings where people worshiped.

This documentary work is a useful first step, but it does not unravel the mysteries of the textually corrupted Zafashi.Sicheng went to work in the Forbidden City every day, and soon found a practical and good solution to this problem.Like Li Jie himself, he turned to the artisans who worked in the Forbidden City for help.In order to make better use of their construction knowledge, he familiarized himself with the Qing Dynasty architectural manual "Engineering Practice Rules" published in 1734.Although he decided that it was not on the same level as the earlier Song Dynasty manuals, it was of great help to his research on the imperial architecture of the Qing Dynasty, which was still dominant in Beijing at the time.He wrote:

"With "Engineering Practice Rules" as textbooks, carpenters as teachers, and Qing Dynasty palaces as teaching aids, The study of the methods and rules of Qing Dynasty architecture began to have a solid foundation. "This book, published by the Ministry of Works in 1734, has seventy chapters. They deal with the design of building materials. Counting and 'Okizuo' rules.Tired of every architectural structure of twenty-seven sizes of houses It is troublesome to provide a measurement method.However, little is known about the method and location of each structure mentioned.This book is hard to read without the craftsmen to point out and explain specific examples.for

The most unique rule of "dougong" in Chinese architecture and the diameter and height of the pillars, the radian of the roof, There are narratives in the book.Other chapters talk about 'small woodwork', joints, stonework, brickwork, tilework, color, etc. " Sicheng compares this "painful" description of dimensions with the Song Dynasty manual, which clarifies the basic principles in a very reasonable way, and then proposes specific formulas for measuring the various architectural parts determined according to different grades . He was lucky to find two old carpenters who had been engaged in the maintenance of Qing Dynasty buildings in the Forbidden City all their lives.Together with them, he scrutinized the complex relationships between the wooden components.It is not simply a matter of the craftsman "pointing out and explaining specific examples", since he needs to know not only the name of each component, but also their location and the function of each component in the overall building.It was here, in the Forbidden House, that the required climbs began to be inspected and accurately measured nearby.