I. Vernacular Dwellings of the Pre-Qin Period

　　The history of vernacular dwellings is very long indeed. In ancient times, when "people were few and beasts were numerous", primitive human beings lived in groups and were so preoccupied with the search for food in order to stay alive that the building of dwellings was of no concern. As stated in the chapter Xici of Yijing (the Book of Changes), "In ancient times, people lived in caves in the wild", and the excavated ruins of caves prove that people in those days did just that, living in caverns in cliffs and forests.

　　6000-7000 years ago, the matriarchal society in China gradually grew prosperous, and large dwellings emerged occupied by members of a clan. Archaeological excavation has unearthed thousands of ruined dwellings, which may be classified into two categories, the northern and the southern.

　　The northern category may be represented by the dwellings of the Yangshao culture, first discovered in 1921 in the village of Yangshao, in the county of Mianchi, Henan Province, hence the name. The ruins are distributed over the area of the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River. Of these, the Banpo village ruin on the east bank of the Chan River is the most famous. According to C14 dating, the Banpo ruin was originated about 4800～4300 B.C., making it over 6000 years old. Houses in Banpo style, spread over the area of the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, have round or square layouts. Most of them are of the shallow cave type, 50～80 cm in depth and dug into the loess, with steps leading to the interior ground surface. The walls were surfaced with trussed wooden posts, some made very rigid. The ground surface was covered with a layer of straw and clay pressed solid. In the center, a shallow arc-shaped pit served as the fire pit for cooking and heating. The roof was supported by a column at the center. There were also columns around the ground building, which not only supported the roof but also constituted the walling. The roof was covered with straw and clay.

　　The southern category may be represented by the ruined dwellings of the Hemudu Culture first found to the northeast of the Hemudu village of Yuyao in Zhejiang. It is an early Neolithic age culture in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River. Here ruins of Ganlan (pile-supported) type buildings and building parts were discovered. This type building has a wooden or bamboo frame, with the ground floor left empty and people living over it. Ganlan buildings in Hemudu had wooden frames and bark roofs. Joints between beams were of tenon-and-mortise. The dovetails and tenons with holes for pins prevented the wooden frames from slipping out of the joint. The floors were closely matched. These buildings manifested a rather mature technique of wooden frames. Here, a ruin of the earliest wooden structured shallow water well was also found. It was square in shape, each side measuring about 2 meters, and had a pavilion built over it. These buildings vary greatly from those of the Yangshao culture of the middle reach of the Yellow River, belonging to another category. According to C14 dating, they were built approx. 4800 B.C., thus making them almost 7000 years old.

　　When a patriarchal form of society came into being 5000 years ago, housing changed from large buildings for collective dwelling in a matriarchal clan society into small ones for patriarchal family units. As seen from ruins unearthed in some places, there were often several large dwellings intermingled with numerous small ones, indicating that there was already a difference between rich and poor. In addition to semi-underground buildings, buildings above ground were increasing. Improving techniques led to mixed clay and wood constructions being employed, and the method of planning slots and building foundations was mastered. Different types of wall such as that of unfired bricks, banzhu (shutter-rammed) and stone set were also developed. Interior wall surfaces began to be finished with lime-like materials, and attention began to be paid to decoration. Although conditions were extremely hard, ancient man, through his industry, created a varied culture of building in different parts of the country that has rightly become famous.

　　During the Shang Dynasty, people had already used numerous bronze tools which greatly facilitated wood construction and the building of clay wall. The latter was called shutter ramming in ancient times. A passage in the second chapter of Gao Zi of the Book of Mencius reads "Fu Yue emerged from banzhu". This was to use wooden planks as side frames, pour loess into the frame cavity and then remove the planks after ramming the loess solid with wooden pestles.

　　In addition to dwellings above ground, at that time prevalent in the north, there were also some semi-underground vernacular dwellings, while pile-supported type buildings were also widely employed. This is verified by the ruins of buildings of the Shang Dynasty Shi'erqiao in Chengdu, Sichuan and in Haimenkou of Jianchuan, Yunnan. Characters discovered to have been used during the Shang Dynasty represent the earliest hieroglyphic writing known in China. From some "Jiaguwen" (inscriptions on bones and tortoise shells) related to architecture, we find that buildings were at that time already rich in form. Architectural decorative patterns employed during the Shang Dynasty often had a religious and superstitious flavor. The architecture had a dignified but also mysterious and threatening look, and its religious message is stronger than its aesthetic appeal.

　　In the Western Zhou Dynasty, the rammed wall of some buildings was overlaid with facing tiles on the exterior and examples of such tiles were unearthed in Yuntang of Fufeng, Shaanxi. Cleverly designed with nipples at each corner to facilitate attachment to the wall surface, these tiles served to protect the wall from weathering. On the roofs of palaces, ancestral temples and residences of nobles, flat and cylindrical tiles were already in use. The introduction of tiles was a major architectural advancement in ancient China. In the Fengchu village of Qishan, Shaanxi, is a ruin of Siheyuan (a traditional Chinese mansion of the compound type with houses built on all four sides of a courtyard and usually without windows in the enclosing walls), being the earliest known in China. Also discovered at the southeast corner of the building was a sewage system consisting of earthenware pipes or set pebbles. This practice of having a sewage exit at the southeast corner of a dwelling continued until the Ming and the Qing Dynasties. Shutter ramming, the common method of building during the Shang Dynasty, was superseded in the period of Spring and Autumn and that of the Warring States by pile-supported. We know from descriptions in the literature of The Zhou dynasty as well as in Zhouli (the Ritual of Zhou), Shijing (the Book of Poems) and Shangshu (the Book of Ancient Time) etc., in addition to excavated testimonies, that not only were the dwellings and palaces of these two periods already on quite a large scale but that they had gate houses, multiple eaves and crisscross latticework over the windows. In the first chapter Chuyu of the book Guoyu (Record of Speeches in Various States), there is a passage reading "High civil works are appropriately rendered beautiful by red paint and carvings", indicating that people at that time were already paying attention to the spiritual implication of buildings. As already mentioned, buildings at that time were mostly of pile- supported type in structure. Floors inside the building were higher than ground level outside, and those entering had first to take off their shoes. The mat seats were located close to the door, and these were used for kneeling on. Beneath them were bamboo room mats, used for measuring the square volume of a room. In the Kaogongji (the Survey on Construction Work) of Zhouli, one could read, for instance," For the king, each room is also of two". Dwellings were further developed in the period of Warring States. Beds were commonly used for sitting-on or lying on to rest. At that time, beds for sleeping were very low but very large, and most peculiarly, were surrounded by balustrades. The building itself was painted, and the color used reflected the owner's position in the social hierarchy. The titles on the eaves were decorated with beautiful relieves of Taotie (a kind of legendary beast), whirls of water and curled clouds.

　　In the southern part of China at that time, storeyed pile-sup- ported type houses prevailed. Basement space was much more extensive than that provided in platform pile-supported type houses in the North. Two small and elegant bronze models of pile-sup- ported type houses dating from the period of the Warring States and unearthed in the village of Dabona, Xiangyun, Yunnan, are highly expressive. They show the lower floors to be spacious while the upper ones projecting, have window openings and xuanshanding (overhang gable-end roofs ). Their decorative interweaving and twisting has something in common with the literary style of the time, showing how different art forms can influence each other given the same social and aesthetic background. The Survey on Construction Work of Zhouli maintained that "time belongs to heaven, air belongs to earth, skill belongs to workmanship and quality belongs to the materials. "materials" Only through a combination of the four can high quality be obtained. Reference was made to the extremely important concept of the correlation of the four factors of time, space, technique and materials.

　　The achievements of the pri-Qin architecture were notable, exemplified in particular by the quality of the modeling of wooden frames and the capacity to appeal to the imagination. It was an architecture that was oriental in style, very different from that of ancient Greece and mirrored the aesthetic conscience and ideals of the period.

　　出版：Springer Wien New York

　　ISBN-3-211-83008-1

　　2000年