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Cultural ideology and the lanscape of Confucian China : the traditional si he yuan

University of British Columbia

The cultural geography and architectural history of China has long been a subject of separate and distinguished interest and research, the one focusing primarily on the vernacular landscapes of peasants and folk societies, and the other focusing predominantly on the grand architectural monuments of empire and religious orders. Seldom has the impetus for both interests been combined so that the cultural life of the people, rich and poor, powerful and powerless alike, and the history of the architectural environment are linked as products and reflections of one another. In the long history of the development of the built environment of China, however, at least one component of the landscape has always figured especially prominent in the interface between society and architecture, namely the vernacular and the elite courtyard compound house. The ideal and the actuality of the courtyard house reveals itself in history, in literature, and on the land as a hardened depository of the most essential values, beliefs and codes of social behavior in Confucian China. Its extraordinary durability and conformity, and its eccentricities were everywhere and almost always a statement about the integrity of the Confucian worldview. Moreover, it was a statement on behalf of an official and encoded cultural and state ideology and its essential li or "proprieties." Its durability was at one with the durability of a total Confucian and Imperial state-sponsored ideology and system. Its change and its eccentricities were, like the ideology and system it housed, grammatical conjugations on a well established and legitimate theme, filled with verve and excitement, but always with an intrinsic order predicated on the logic of the Confucian cultural ideology and state system. It is the principal aim of this study to explore the linkage between culture and architecture in the human landscape of Confucian China as revealed by the courtyard compound. The main thesis of the study is that the built environment and the courtyard compound in particular reveals itself as a Confucian social landscape the meanings of which are apparent in its symbology, in the assignment of status places within its boundaries, and in its overall design, form and structure. In this way too, the study is a study in the social fabric and ideological commitments of a once powerful tradition whose hold on the landscape was virtually without exception, but which has now dissipated or disappeared into the furnaces and highrise structures of the industrializing and revolutionary ideologies of the twentieth century.

Text

2010-07-17

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/26604

Geography

University of British Columbia

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