Chapter 24 Section 3 A Indian House

Many houses in southern my country are also in the form of courtyard houses.Due to the small population in the south, it is impossible for houses to occupy a lot of land, and the climate is humid, especially hot in summer, so the yards of the courtyard houses here are relatively small.The main rooms and wing rooms are connected together, and some are built as two-story buildings, which not only reduces the land occupation, but also facilitates ventilation and is cooler on the upper floors. The courtyard in the center of the residence becomes a small courtyard surrounded by buildings.The most compact of this kind of courtyard house is an Indian residence in Yunnan.

There are many courtyard houses of this type in central Yunnan (Figure 22).It has three main rooms, two side rooms on the left and right, an inverted seat facing the street in front, and a residential gate in the middle.The surrounding houses are two-storey, with a patio in the center, high walls outside the house, and few windows. The whole appearance is square and neat, like a seal, so it is commonly called "a seal".This kind of house with three main rooms, four side rooms, and eight feet deep in the inverted seat is also called: "three rooms, four ears inverted and eight feet", which is the most representative in a seal.In a seal, the central one of the three rooms on the ground floor of the main room is mostly used as a living room for receiving guests, the left and right are the bedrooms of the master, the ground floor of the ear room is the kitchen and the pens for pigs and horses, and the middle of the main room upstairs is used for worshiping ancestors. The ancestral hall or the Buddhist hall for chanting scriptures and offering to the Buddha, and the rest of the rooms are for living and storing crops.Such an arrangement is naturally in line with the family etiquette system in feudal society.