A very long time ago, far away in China, a villager living along the banks of the Yellow River built a simple mud hut to shelter his family. Thousands of years later in the year 1420, the empire’s best craftsmen put the final touches on the ultimate masterpiece of Chinese architecture --- the Temple of Heaven.

“Chinese buildings evolved from simple shelters into complex magnificent structures with great swooping roofs, stately columns, and rich detail.”

Between this simple mud hut and this amazingly complex structure--- its every detail full with cosmological symbolism--- is a tale of emperors, monks, scholars and genius craftsmen--- a story which explains an architectural tradition of great beauty and flexibility. And to start this story at the beginning, we have to leap back two millennia, to when the brilliant tyrant QinShihuang becomes the first emperor of a unified China.

In 1938, an American fighter pilot flying over a remote part of China, spotted giant pyramid-like structures below. In his excitement he took a photo and declared to the world that he had discovered a lost civilization. What he discovered, however, weren’t pyramids, but massive tomb mounds. And the grandest of them all was the tomb of the man who unified China.

“Our story begins with the tomb of QinShihuang the first emperor of China, who lived 200 years before Christ.”

A brilliant warrior and tactician, he annihilated all his rival states and created the imperial system which survived until the year 1904. And the grandeur of his tomb matched that of his ambitions:

For more than thirty years he used 700,000 workers--- probably more manpower than the pharaohs had assembled to built the pyramids--- to re-construct his kingdom in the private underground world of his tomb, with palaces and courts for a hundred officials, rooms containing countless gems, rivers of mercury and candles which would never burn out. They sat you can’t take it with you, but QinShihuang sure tried.

“His tomb was guarded by hundreds of terracotta warriors, but just as fascinating were the clay model houses that were found inside his tomb.”

Because of their belief that people had to provide for their ancestors in death, the early Chinese buried their deceased with clay models of the structures they depended on in life- granaries, houses, watchtowers and the like. These 2000 year-old models are the only surviving examples of early Chinese wooden architecture, and from them we can see how houses were constructed around the time of the first emperor. These models show a type of wooden house that incredibly can still be seen today.

So why did the ancient Chinese build in wood rather than stone, like the ancient Europeans? The availability of wood in the extensive forests of early China was no doubt a major factor. The ancient Chinese did know how to build with stone, and how to use the arch… and they used the arch extensively for tombs, gates and bridges. However they rejected the stone arch for building houses, temples and palaces.

To see why we can again find clue from the tomb of the fiest emperor. Archaeologists recently excavated from the tomb a 2000 year-old sword that is still sharp as a razor.The reason it is still sharp is because it is coated with chrome- a fact that may not seem too amazing until you realize that chromium wasn’t invented until 1938- the same year the tombs were spotted by that American pilot.

This means is that the ancient Chinese developed incredible metal-working skills very early in their history, and so they had metal woodworking tools at a very early date.

Stone can be used to fashion and work stone, as early Britons must have done to build Stonehenge. But iron tools were necessary for wood carving and joinery. And with such tools, however primitive, wood construction was much easier than construction in stone.

Western cultures began their architecture without iron tools. So they started in stone and brick and continued building with these materials. The Chinese, on the other hand, began building with wood and continued to do so for 6000 years, starting with the basic Chinese house which was first developed on the flood plain of the yellow river.

In areas prone to flooding, this structure was raised on pilings. In the central yellow river valley of China it rested on solid platform. 

Stone bases for each column, twice the diameter of the column, were placed on this platform, then the column raised on top of this.

So, the elevation of a Chinese building has three elements: the podium underneath, the columns in between and big roof resting on top of the columns. Four columns form what is called a bay; groups of bays then form the different types of buildings. From the earliest times the Chinese separated the supporting from the enclosing elements of a building. This meant the interior columns supported the roof weight completely, while the walls were just for privacy and protection from the elements.

In a country plagued by powerful earthquakes, the Chinese didn’t build solid walls, which could be cracked and rent apart by an upheaval of the earth’s crust, but rather they built flexible structures without using glue or nails. These structures could ride the heaving earth like a boat, shifting and settling back, with the platform acting almost like a raft.

Heavy roofs with tiles were supported by columns built of white fir which was four times stronger than steel, and six times more flexible than concrete.

It was the beginning of an architecture of great beauty, elegance and practicality.

The first feature of a Chinese building that usually impresses a visitor is the elegant, sweeping and seemingly gigantic roof.

Western architecture, with its spires and Greek columns - and more recently skyscrapers – usually emphasizes the vertical. And since the introduction of concrete, steel and glass, modern Western architecture has remained a vertical architecture of walls, facades, and invisible roofs.

Chinese architecture offers a delightful contrast. The most expressive element is the roof, with its great curving slope, and the emphasis is on the horizontal. The approaching pedestrian can see the whole roof, even as he begins to enter the building.

While Europeans built their roofs using a truss system incorporating diagonal beams, the Chinese used a post and beam system; there are no diagonals. The stepped shape allowed for the curvature of the roof.

Using this system roofs could be expanded to create buildings of impressive scale. 

The height of a building has never equaled status in China. In the year 1747, the emperor Qianlong commissioned European missionaries to design a summer palace in "the manner of European Barbarians". The emperor had them build a two-story facade in front of traditional one-story Chinese halls, because the emperor had no wish 'to live in the air' like Europeans who, as the emperor commented 'must be very poverty-stricken and lack land' to live in such a fashion. 

Instead of height, the rank and importance of Chinese building is determined by the roof design. One can see that this temple was patronized by the imperial family by the yellow diamond on the roof. Elaborate roof ornaments also denote the importance of a building. The part that looks like the tail of a fish at either end of the main ridge is known as the ridge-devouring beast: the mythical son of the Sea dragon, able to whip up waves and create rain. These ornaments were in fact symbolic fire extinguishers. 

Along the sloping ridge there might also be a string of smaller animals: nine for imperial buildings, with the number of animals decreasing as the importance of the building decreases. Often found sitting on the corner is this evil prince riding on a hen, which represents a legendary tyrant who was cruel to his people. He is fated to suffer the elements for all eternity. 

Not just heavy with symbolic meaning, the actual physical weight of a Chinese roof is enormous-around four times the weight of a traditional western tiled roof. Roofs were covered with heavy glazed tiles-typically gray, but sometimes also quite colorful; blue, green, and in the Forbidden City, they are glazed an imperial yellow. The columns that hold these enormous roofs had to be stout. As protection from weather and termites, the pillars were often painted with lacquer or an oil and hemp mixture which had brick dust mixed into it; from this came the custom of painting the columns a bold red color, which later of course became symbolic of good fortune. 

The heavy tiled roofs would seem to require a dense forest of columns to support them. But the Chinese secret of supporting a heavy roof on only a few columns is ingenious. The columns bear this enormous weight roofs with the assistance of brackets. 

"In western architecture, much of the complexity of a building is in its foundation. In the East, it's in a complicated pyramidal system of brackets and crossbeams designed to hold a heavy tiled roof, and which give it its characteristic curves shape. This ingenious system is called duo gong, and its elements are fundamentally quite simple. It's made up of brackets which sit on top of columns, and into which are fitted crossbeams. 

They have three parts - the Duo, a block, like a capital, placed at the top of a column. The gong, a bracket placed across the top of the deng, and the spacers between them, called the sheng. "

The degree of complexity is wonderful, with brackets locking together like a Chinese puzzle without any nails or glue. With these duogong the Chinese could extend the roof overhand, without having to building more and more columns inside. 

To extend the overhang even further, the Chinese devised a clever solution. The roof overhang is one end of a kind of see-saw. Its weight is counterbalanced by the weight of the center of the roof, at the other end of the see-saw, on the fulcrum of just one column. This device, called an ang, lets one column to do the work of three, And makes the heavy tiled roof seem to float in mid-air. 

Heavy roofs create what is known as 'shear stress' . The Europeans built "flying buttresses" to bear the enormous stress created by a cathedral dome. The Chinese on the other hand used brackets at the joints of frames to carry this shear stress down through the brackets and columns into the ground. Increasingly complex bracketing accompanied ever larger, more complex multi-leveled roofs: which came in a myriad of shapes and sizes.

"A standardized system of architectural measurement was established in the year 1103, with the publication of Li Chieh's Methods and forms of architecture, a treatise adopted throughout the vast, yet centralized, empire. 

This book defined the basic units of measurement as standardized sizes of the duogong bracket arms. Depending on the size of the bracket was determined the size of every other element in the building: such as the thickness and height of the columns. This standard survived into modern times. 

These rules of Chinese architecture governed not only the construction of an individual buildings but also the planning of the layout of a town, a temple, or a palace complex. Ancient Chinese Shamans oriented buildings according to the dictates of feng shui, or wind and water a way of determining mystical forces flowing through the earth. The principles of feng shui were turned into rules used to align man-made structures harmoniously with the currents of the earth's forces, known as chi. These rules controlled siting, ground plan, decoration, and even color. Although steeped in ancient Chinese animistic religion, most of these seemingly mystical rules have their origin in a few simple and practical facts about the climate of central China. 

China is situated in the temperate zone, with a southwest prevailing wind. By orienting buildings to the south or southeast, the Chinese take advantage of the warmth winds and sunshine from the south to provide people living in halls and courtyards with a pleasant micro-climate. Not only buildings faced south but also cities, palaces and tombs. 

Ancient Chinese shamans found the directions with the aid of a sinan: history's first magnetic compass. The pointer, shaped like a spoon, was made out of magnetic lodestone. It sits within a circle to represent heaven, and on a square plate representing earth.