Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Chinese Architecture and Metaphor: Song Culture in the Yingzao Fashi Building Manual . By Jiren Feng . Honolulu : University of Hawai'i Press , 2012. xiv, 304 pp. $53.00 (cloth).
Book Reviews--China
The construction manual Yingzao fashi (Building standards) was compiled by Li Jie, an imperial official in the Directorate of Construction. Published in 1103, it is one of the most significant documents in Chinese architectural history. Since the rediscovery of the book in 1919, Chinese architectural historians have used it as a key to the world of ancient master carpenters. Besides seeking to understand its technical terms and methods, and besides reconstructing its line drawings by means of material evidence from extensive field investigations, architectural historians have made substantial progress in determining how the Yingzao fashi functioned as a set of technical standards in the construction of buildings during the Song dynasty. The main questions they have attempted to answer include how the measurements of the eight different grades of the cai module, stipulated in the manual, were determined and by which rationale; how the module principle was applied to architectural design in the Song, Liao, and Jin dynasties; and what the differences were between the two basic types of structures mentioned in the manual, the tingtang and the diantang. During the past three decades, interest in Chinese architectural history has also increased in the...