FOREWORD

For a good many years now,thanks to the ambitious and sensitive researches of Ronald Knapp, historians of China have learned to be more aware of the beauty and complexity of the spaces in which the Chinese live and have lived.

I still remember when I first got my own real sense of this. It was on a sunny day several years ago as I was driving with some recently made friends through southeastern Hunan. Acting on a whim, we parked by the side of a road and set off to look at a nearby valley. After strolling a short while, we found ourselves in a village, navigating a maze of narrow lanes between mud or adobe walls. The walls grew steadily higher, until suddenly we came out into an open space full of sunshine. The view, as we had hoped, was breathtaking: in the foreground, a long expanse of beaten earth,clearly a threshing floor; beyond that, the slender but sturdy lines of stone-paved dikes that served as dividers and paths between the paddy fields of shimmering rice plants; and across the fields, wooded hills below distant mountains.

But the real surprise came when I turned around, to look back at the narrow alleys from which our little group had come. For now I could see that in the very front of the village through which we had been walking stood three stone houses, side by side. They were tall, with massive doors, smooth walls, and curving black roofs. The framings around the windows were decorated with dark wood lattice and wooden carvings of intricate elegance. One of the doors stood ajar: from the threshold one could look into a lofty entrance hall, cool and spacious.Straight ahead,clearly visible despite the shadows, was a space for ancestral portraits and tablets; to left and right, openings led to side courts, and what appeared to be rows of smaller rooms. The place seemed deserted, perhaps abandoned.

As Knapp would have told me had he been there, the house I was peering into represented the four basic norms for traditional Chinese dwellings: “bilateral symmetry, axiality, hierarchy, and enclosure” (Knapp, page 195). The strong stone structure defined a flow of specialized and functional spaces that in the past would have “mediated behavior and helped mold the actions of family members” (page 68). And the positioning of the house, its relationship to the landscape and to its neighbors, were all conditioned by the rigorous yet fluid demands of fengshui, which Knapp helpfully defines as a “topographic configuration” for the village as a whole, an “orderly arrangement” of space and warmth for those living within (page 166).

Amongst the twenty case studies of specific houses—from Shaanxi to Fujian, from Sichuan to Jiangsu—that Knapp presents in this splendid and comprehensive new book, I found many depictions that enriched my understanding of that Hunan house I saw in earlier years. But more than that, he has also made me reflect on wider issues of Chinese economics and politics.Knapp’s houses are often parts of networks of power and money, which he painstakingly dissects for us, whereas there is no indication that the little community I stumbled upon had any political or financial history of note. The valley was a long distance from any township, let alone a larger central hub of gentry living, or élite and wealthy merchant culture. The architectural beauty and the craftsmanship I chanced upon may have been diffused local variants of a dominant Hunanese urban center, but if so I could not find the link. And if mine was just a random encounter, as I believe it was, how many such chance encounters must be waiting others, in sites of equal beauty where the turbulence of wars and revolutions has still left the architectural fabric intact? I had always thought it was too late to save China’s architectural legacy from the iron laws of development. But perhaps that is not so, after all.

Jonathan Spence
Yale University

This painting by Daoji, also known as Shitao (1642–1707), illustrates Tao Yuanming’s poem “The Peach Blossom Spring,” that tells of a lost fisherman who comes across a bucolic, utopian community of farmers living in simple dwellings. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.