Chinese Architecture edited by Nancy S. Steinhardt, contributions by Fu Xinian, Liu Xujie, Pan Guix, Guo Daiheng, Qiao Yun, Sun Dazhang (The Culture & Civilization of China: Yale University Press and the China International Publishing Group of Beijing) A comprehensive and authoritative study of Chinese architecture from Neolithic times to the late-19th century. Six of China 's greatest architectural historians have joined with a leading Western scholar to write this text, a collaborative history of Chinese architecture. Drawing on recent discoveries and scholarly work inside China , the volume recounts the story of China 's architectural achievements, the forms they took and the historical, political, cultural and social factors that shaped them. Each chapter includes sections on cities, palatial architecture, religious architecture, tombs and gardens, as well as discussions of bridges, walls, fortifications, academies and architectural writings. Enhanced with colour plates and line drawings, explanatory maps and charts, and an index that includes Chinese terms, this should be an accessible resource for both scholars of China and visitors to China alike.

Lavishly illustrated Chinese Architecture is a comprehensive and authoritative study of Chinese architecture from Neolithic times through the late nineteenth century. Six of China 's greatest architectural historians have joined with a leading Western scholar to write this book, the first in-depth, collaborative history of Chinese architecture in more than fifty years.

Drawing on recent discoveries and current scholarly work inside China , this handsome volume recounts the story of China 's architectural achievements, the forms they took, and the historical, political, cultural, and social factors that shaped them. Each chapter includes sections on cities, palatial architecture, religious architecture, tombs, and gardens as well as discussions of bridges, walls, fortifications, academies, and architectural writings.

Amply enhanced with color plates and line drawings-many of which are reproduced here for the first time-explanatory maps and charts, and an index that includes Chinese terms, the book will be an invaluable and accessible resource for both scholars of China and visitors to China alike.

Yin Yu Tang: The Architecture and Daily Life of a Chinese House by Nancy Berliner (Tuttle) The Yin Yu Tang House has already made headlines across the country. Articles in the Boston Globe, the New York Times and a feature on CBS Sunday Morning have piqued the public's interest in this ancient Chinese home, now a permanent exhibit at Salem, Massachusetts' Peabody Essex Museum.

Yin Yu Tang: The Architecture and Daily Life of a Chinese House tells the story behind the house. The book offers a fascinating, in-depth look at Chinese domestic culture, architecture, artistry, and history. The book examines all these elements through a detailed exploration of a house built during the second half of the Qing dynasty in China (1644-1911). A prosperous merchant surnamed Huang built the new house for his family in the remote mountain village that had been home to his ancestors for more than 20 generations.

Nancy Berliner, curator of Chinese Art at the Peabody Essex Museum, tells the story of Yin Yu Tang in fascinating detail. Berliner's research extends beyond the house into the very fabric of Chinese life. Not only does she explain the architecture of the Yin Yu Tang house, but she tells of Chinese family life from the poems recited at weddings to the stories the children learned in school. It's all here - a history of China and its people, told in loving detail for anyone interested in that country's history or Asian culture in general.

If you love the house, you also love the crow on its roof.

The purpose of Yin Yu Tang is to examine a Chinese house from the village of Huang Cun, called by its inhabitants "Yin Yu Tang." Like many Chinese verbal expressions, the name of this house lends itself to many levels of poetic interpretation. The three words can be translated simply as Shade/Shelter, Abundance, and Hall. They imply an aspiration for sons who will become high officials---and the desire that the building will shelter the builder's descen­dants for many generations.

While still standing in Huang Cun, Yin Yu Tang sheltered eight generations of Huang family descendants. Over the past years it has been relocated from China-dismantled, crated, uncrated, con­served and then re-erected-to the Peabody Essex Museum, of Salem, Massachusetts, in the United States.

In exploring the house called Yin Yu Tang, it is clear that a home is made up of much more than the lines, the designs and the wood that frame the building's spaces.

The examination of this two-hundred-year-old house led to an examination of its home village of Huang Cun, through each and every one of the timbers which made up its walls, floors, and ceil­ings, through its rooms, through the lives and memories of the many people who occupied them, and through the history of their decoration and modification of their personal spaces.

The term "archiculture" describes this more expansive way of looking at architecture. Archiculture can be defined as "the culture inherent in the creation, the use, the decoration and the history of an architectural space." Considering the many physical, temporal and human facades that are contained by Yin Yu Tang, this archicultural approach includes both the house and the crow on the roof.

This all-encompassing approach to examining a home is par­ticularly appropriate when considering the Chinese regional domestic architecture on exhibit in Yin Yu Tang.

The Chinese word jia can mean family, hometown, and home. The high value that traditional Chinese culture places on parents and family also extends to devotion to hometown and the physi­cal family home.

In China, deceased ancestors are considered part of a family. At regular ceremonies, living descendants hung portraits of their ancestors in their reception hall, visited their graves, and offered them food, clothing and utensils for their use in the spirit world. This loyalty to, and worship of, the family's ancestors stems from the traditional understanding that ancestors and preceding generations are intimately linked with the success and longevity of the present and future generations.

The hometown, of course, is where the ancestors are buried, and where they receive offerings, and where all members of the family line are to be buried.

The physical home is a haven for both the spirits of the ances­tors and their living descendants. Though the crow may have flown off, and generations passed away, the ancestors' imprint on their family, their home, and their hometown remain-and are part of the living realm.

In this sense, a house incorporates and cannot be separated from the family that inhabits it. Because of this indivisible nature of the jia, the chapters that follow discuss not only the physical structure of Yin Yu Tang, and not only its original design, but also the ancestral village that surrounded it and the family who lived within it, molding and remaking it over time.

Given the antiquity of Chinese culture, and the dramatic sweep of its history over the past few hundred years, it is as important to place Yin Yu Tang in time as it is to locate it geographically. In the time line below, the small circle represents the moment in time when Yin Yu Tang, was created. During the hundreds, even thou­sands, of years leading up to that point, different styles of domestic housing developed, including the regional Huizhou architecture.

During the years directly before the creation of Yin Yu Tang, the man who commissioned the house, influenced by his fellow Huizhou merchants, may have saved as much of his income as he could in anticipation of building a grand home for himself and his descendants. In the years directly following its construction, the descendants of the original builder were born, lived, produced heirs and then died in this house. Throughout the years of their lives, they were formed by the "archiculture" of their house, and dutifully left their own mark on it.

"If you love the house, you also love the crow on its roof. " This Chinese saying recognizes the importance of acknowledging the totality-the entirety of an object or person.

According to the guidelines created for the preservation of Yin Yu Tang, its re-erection at the Peabody Essex Museum was designed to preserve the entirety of the house's history, including the impact of time and people on the house.

A well-worn threshold and the remains of a fine brick carving smashed during the Cultural Revolution are as much a part of the house and its history as one of the untouched brick tile ornaments on the facade. Likewise, the use of the reception hall for playing mahjong in the 1920s and the occupation of a room by a poor peasant family after land reform in 1950 are as much a part of the of the house's archiculture as are the bases of the stone columns. Every aspect of the house-no matter how common or ephemeral -was to be preserved in the process.

This book, Yin Yu Tang, considers the geographical, economic and historical circumstances that determined the development of the family who built the house, as well as the physical construction of the house, and the lives of many of the individual members of the Huang fam­ily who lived, laughed and cried, who cooked and ate, who pasted up wallpapers and occasionally tore down traditions, within the high walls of Yin Yu Tang.

At its new location in the United States, Yin Yu Tang will open its doors to embrace non-Huang family members, visitors from all corners of the earth. These new occupants, temporary though their stay may be, will be welcome to explore all aspects of Yin Yu Tang­and experience and learn from both the house and the lives of the people who inhabited it.

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