Chinese Traditional

Traditional Chinese buildings are timber frames of columns and beams, joined largely without glue or nails, set on raised platforms under large curved tile roofs. Between the columns and the roof are dougong, sets of interlocking wooden brackets that carry the roof's weight down into the columns and let the eaves project farther. Buildings are arranged symmetrically along a north-south axis around courtyards, from the siheyuan, a house enclosing a courtyard on four sides, to the imperial palace. Roof form and color marked rank: hip roofs sloping on all four sides were reserved for the emperor, as were yellow glazed tiles.

The Forbidden City in Beijing (1406-1420) has 980 surviving buildings under yellow tile roofs; its Hall of Supreme Harmony is the largest surviving wooden structure in China. The Temple of Heaven in Beijing uses blue roof tiles to represent the sky. Ming dynasty brackets are smaller and more closely spaced than the Tang dynasty ones on the East Hall of Foguang Temple (857).

Pottery building models from Eastern Han dynasty tombs (25-220 CE) show timber buildings with bracket sets and tiled roofs. The oldest surviving timber halls date from the Tang dynasty: the main hall of Nanchan Temple (782) and the East Hall of Foguang Temple (857), both on Mount Wutai in Shanxi province. In 1103 the Song dynasty government printed the Yingzao Fashi, a building manual by Li Jie that set standard timber sizes in eight grades and specified bracket designs.

The Ming dynasty built the Forbidden City between 1406 and 1420, and 24 Ming and Qing emperors lived there until 1924. The Qing Ministry of Works issued its own construction standards in 1734. Later bracket sets became smaller and more numerous and served partly as ornament. In the 1930s the architects Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin surveyed old buildings across northern China, and in 1937 they identified the Tang date of the Foguang Temple East Hall. The Forbidden City became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.