Architecture in China during the Northern Wei, the Liao and the Yuan Regimes

Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures 

2014 Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures  2014

by Nancy S. Steinhart

Date: 

Tuesday, April 8, 2014, 4:15pm

 See also: Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures

Location: 

CGIS Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Tsai Auditorium (S010), Harvard University

Nancy S. Steinhardt is professor of East Asian art and curator of Chinese art at the University of Pennsylvania where she has taught since 1982.  She received her PhD at Harvard in 1981 where she was a Junior Fellow from 1978-81. Steinhardt taught at Bryn Mawr from 1981-1982. She has broad research interests in the art and architecture of China and China’s border regions, particularly problems that result from the interaction between Chinese art and that of peoples to the North, Northeast, and Northwest.

Steinhardt is author or coeditor of Chinese Traditional Architecture (1984), Chinese Imperial City Planning (1990), Liao Architecture (1997), Chinese Architecture (2003), Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture (2005), Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts (2011), Chinese Architecture in an Age of Turmoil, 200-600 (in press), The Chinese Mosque (under contract), Chinese Architecture: Ten Lectures (under contract) and more than 70 articles.

East Asian Internationalism and Beyond:

Crossing Borders in Chinese Architectural History

Architecture is without doubt one of the most distinctive elements of Chinese civilization. Its characteristic features – roofs, gables, columns, bracket sets – mean that everyone can recognize a Chinese building when they see one. That these and other features remained so remarkably consistent over time may lead us to conclude that Chinese architecture was a closed system, a building tradition that resisted influences from outside and in which continuities in timber-frame construction and roof decoration can be straightforwardly traced over millennia. Through the centuries, however, the highly recognizable Chinese style in building has been adopted and adapted near and far, from Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia to England and the United States. How can an architectural tradition apparently so hidebound be so elastic?

These three lectures by the leading American historian of Chinese monumental architecture take up this question by examining developments from a time when Inner Asian regimes, and not Chinese dynasties, governed in the Central Plains. The Northern Wei state of the Xianbei, the Liao state of the Khitans, and the Yuan state of the Mongols, all represent periods of alien rule when challenges were posed to established systems of building in China. In a magisterial overview of Chinese architectural history set broadly in a Eurasian context, Professor Steinhardt demonstrates that, although it might seem that architecture changed little during those periods, buildings constructed under the patronage of non-Chinese rulers in fact stretched the building system beyond anything previously erected in China, and that what we think of as “Chinese” architecture can be thought of as constituting an early “internationalism” in building and space.

Lecture 1: The Sixth Century as the Seventh and Eighth: Recentering an International Age in Chinese Architectural History

The lecture begins by asking questions that have driven the study of Chinese architecture through the twentieth century: Why do so many Chinese buildings look like so many others? What are the principles that govern Chinese construction? How did our current Chinese architectural history come to be written? Is Chinese architecture in fact a Chinese, Japanese, and Korean building system? Is the period of the Tang dynasty (618-907) really the first “international age” for East Asian art and architecture? In answering the last question, the lecture argues that Sino-Korean-Japanese internationalism in art and architecture in fact occurred earlier, in the sixth century, and to a certain extent even in the fifth. In the conclusion, the implications of an international sixth-century and themes that will be important in Lectures 2 and 3 are presented.

Discussants:

Yukio Lippit, Harvard University  (faculty website)

James Robson, Harvard University  (faculty website)

Lecture 2: Wednesday, April 9, 2014

The Liao Revolution in Building and Design
For more details, click here

Lecture 3: Thursday, April 10, 2014
Shifting the Borders: A Revisionist History of Yuan Architecture
For more details, click here

Reception follows each lecture

Cosponsored with the Korea Institute and the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University