Chinese Architecture and Metaphor: Song Culture in the "Yingzao Fashi" Building Manual by Jiren Feng (review)

Chinese Architecture and Metaphor by Jiren Feng is about an official building treatise, entitled Yingzao fashi 營造法式 (abbreviated YZFS), translated as Building Standards in the book. Compiled by the official Li Jie 李誡 (1035?–1110) and promulgated in 1103 by the court of the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), the YZFS is unique in its nature and content, making it the most recognizable and influential premodern text in both the history and historiography of Chinese architecture as a modern discipline. A young field of research, Chinese architectural history did not receive much scholarly attention until the modern discovery of the YZFS in 1919 and its subsequent reprinting in 1925. This prompted scholars and amateurish erudites alike to investigate the ancient building trade and eventually turn the age-old practice into systematic knowledge of China's architectural tradition.

The text is inextricably tied to a research center and an architectural historian. The Institute for Research in Chinese Architecture, or Zhongguo yingzao xueshe 中國營造學社, was founded in 1930 and is responsible for many of the architectural surveys conducted during the 1930s and '40s that later became the research basis of the field. The first institute of its kind ever established in China, the Institute explicitly paid tribute to the YZFS by using the conventional phrase yingzao for "architecture" in its name, rather than the more modern disciplinary term, jianzhu 建築. The endeavor of the Institute was largely promoted by the preeminent scholar Liang Sicheng 梁 思成 (1901–1972), who also published the first annotations for the YZFS.¹ It was through the early efforts of the Institute, led by Liang and many of his colleagues and later his students, that the building knowledge embedded in the YZFS became understandable and transmittable and formed the cornerstone for this field of research, whose importance can still be felt even today.

Much of the modern feast made available by uncovering and rescuing the initially obscure and abstruse text that had long fallen into oblivion, however, was brought about by weeding out many of its historical allusions and much of its imprecision and, indeed, its metaphorical language to make it useful as a set of factual "building standards" or a technical manual in the modern sense. Chinese Architecture and Metaphor seems to have been written to counter this scientific, objective approach, as Feng more than once argues that "the YZFS should be seen as more than a mere technical manual" (p. 213). Certainly Feng does not refute the critical position of its technical content, but what has been left out in this "modern" approach to the YZFS, he argues, are the "broader cultural value and implications of the work" (p. 7). In other words, Chinese Architecture and Metaphor is not so much about what the YZFS is in term of its technical content as what it was as a literary text of its time. This shift of focus and ways of "reading," the author believes, would "open a new mode of understanding architecture and its distinctive culture in imperial China" (p. 213). To some extent, therefore, Feng reverses the major trends in the field of China's architectural history in his attempt to reinstate the historical allusions and reconsider those imprecise and metaphorical elements, to make the text contextual again in its specific cultural and intellectual background. This in turn will help us grapple with the "construction of the knowledge field of architecture in premodern China" (p. 12). The contribution of the work to current scholarship on the YZFS will be assessed later in this review, but first of all I would like to turn to what Feng does in the book to re-contextualize the YZFS in its time.

Shifting the focus away from its technical content, the author asks a set of very different questions in regard to, for example, its underlying state ideology, literary tradition and associations, and different components that together...