Page 164 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

more accurate and archaic in feeling than those of Ming and
Ch'ing. Illustrated catalogues of the bronzes and jades in the col-
lection of the emperor Hui-tsung were published in the twelfth
century and subsequently reprinted in more unreliable editions
that served as the source for many of the fanciful reproductions of
later centuries.
178 Se veil-tiered bracket for a palace
hall. Illustration from the Sung Dynasty
architectural manual, Ymg-tsjofa-shih
(1925 edition). Woodcut. "Hill
Hill

ARCHITECTURE It is in character with the synthesising trend of the period that the
first great manual of architectural practice, the Ying-tsao fa-shih,
presented to the emperor in 1 100, should have been written in the
Sung Dynasty. The author, Li Chieh, a practising architect in the
Board of Works, combines historical scholarship with a consid-
erable amount of straightforward technical information on mate-
rials and construction, which in his rime was becoming increas-
ingly complex and refined—if not so grand in scale as in the T'ang
Dynasty. The ang, for example, is now no longer a simple canti-
levered arm jutting out to hold up the eaves; it is cut loose from
supports at either end and poised on the top of an intricate brack-
eting system, held in balance by a complex play of stresses and
strains. In rime, this intricacy for its own sake will lead to degen-
eration, but in Sung timber construction it combines structural
boldness with refinement of detail. Sung taste also preferred the
delicate to the robust, the tall and slender to the gigantic and solid,
and Kaifeng was a city of spires. Temples had roofs of yellow tiles
and were floored with yellow and green. Timber and stone pago-
179 Twelve-sided pagoda of Fu-kung- das now acquired little projecting roofs at each storey, curving up
ssu. Ying-hsien. Shansi. Sung Dynasty,
1058. at the point where two faces met.
CO