This paper explores fangmugou (“imitating the mode of building with wood”), a comprehensive and longstanding architectural leitmotif reflective of the socio-cultural environment of China. Whether carved in stone, molded in clay, or cast in metal fangmugou continuously serves to visually confirm and ratify the significance of wood as the primary building material in Chinese architectural history. By peeling off the successive layers of distortion between model and replica, this paper uncovers the traces of wood embedded in fangmugou, and deciphers the visual and symbolic language that evolved out of the physical properties of wood, even as the final product transcends materiality by adapting to new media.
This paper is an inquiry into possible motivations for representing timber-frame architecture in the Buddhist context. By comparing the architectural language of early Buddhist narrative panels and cave temples rendered in stone, I suggest that architectural representation was employed in both masonry and timber to create symbolically charged worship spaces. The replication and multiplication of palace forms on cave walls, in “pagodas” (futu 浮圖, fotu 佛圖, or ta 塔), and as the crowning element of free-standing pillars reflect a common desire to express and harness divine power, a desire that resulted in a wide variety of mountainous monuments in China. Finally, I provide evidence to suggest that the towering Buddhist monuments of early medieval China are linked morphologically and symbolically to the towering temples of South Asia through the use of both palace forms and sacred ma alas as a means to express the divine power and expansive presence of the Buddha.
It is easy to find an association between stone architecture and the afterlife in pre-modern China, given that most architecture of brick and stone was used only for mortuary monuments. People in pre-modern China may have believed that timber architecture was for the living while stone architecture was for the deceased. The fact that stone architecture often was designed to imitate timber architecture further buttresses the dominance of timber, both structurally and aesthetically, in the architectural history of pre-modern China. This article focuses on several stone buildings that were built during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) for daily religious activities and were rare exceptions to the normative association of stone architecture with the afterlife. Through the study of the structure, decorative motifs and history of these stone buildings, I determine whether they were built to reflect the tradition of imitation timber architecture or were an exception to the dominance of timber architecture. I investigate how these stone buildings should be contextualized in the history of Yuan as well as the history of Chinese architecture.
The copper hall was a special type of building in Chinese architectural history. It imitates traditional Chinese timber architecture in terms of structure, but with all its components cast out of copper alloys and then assembled. During the Wanli reign of the Ming dynasty, three such Buddhist copper halls were constructed from 1602 to 1607, and set up at Emei Mountain, Baohua Mountain, and Wutai Mountain. The present article makes several points. First, the three copper halls were from the same design, as determined through historical texts and on-site investigation. In conception, they may have been inspired by Taoist copper halls, but did not follow those particular designs. Furthermore, the author has created a statistical database of all the inscriptions from Wutai Copper Hall and loaded the data into the GIS platform, which was keyed to a historical map of 1582. The data suggest that the patrons of Wutai Copper Hall lived in areas along the Grand Canal, the Sanggan River, and the Fen River; and that the patrons were numerous. The Chan Master Miaofeng was not only an organizer but also an experienced project manager who preferred brick, stone and metal to timber. Under his organizing and management, people from different social classes and communities willingly contributed. Finally, this paper contextualizes the Buddhist building projects of the late Wanli period. The inscriptions in Wutai Copper Hall reliably record a vivid landscape of Ming society. The donation initiated by Miaofeng was not merely a personal action but also an influential event the effect of which lasted for years. The numerous patrons were organized not by the power afforded by any state representative, but by networks of monks, nuns, merchants, local religious communities, and pilgrim associations. Copper halls, especially Wutai Copper Hall, are excellent evidence for how religious monumental projects were organized, managed, and implemented in late Ming society.
Together with pillars and roof, the bracket set is one of the most fundamental structural components of traditional timber-frame architecture in China. Not only structurally indispensable, it was also emblematic of specific building styles developed through history. Entering the modern era, however, its architectural validity was overturned by the use of modern technology and building materials, rendering brackets merely a visual and decorative motif. This paper contends that it was precisely when the bracket set lost its structural significance that it began to be discussed in ways that endowed it with layers of cultural meaning in the context of modern China. Examining its modern appropriations in materials other than wood throughout the twentieth century, the paper explores shifting meanings of brackets in their continuous transmutations from a reminder of a defunct component in the building tradition to a nostalgic sign for an irretrievable architectural past.