Page 203 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

210 The Three Great Halls. San Ta
building is a plain rectangle. The eaves have become so heavily Tien, of the Forbidden City, looking
south.
loaded with unnecessary carpentry that the architect has to place
an extra colonnade under their outer edge to support the weight,
thus making superfluous the elaborate cantilcvcrcd system of
brackets and ang, which now shrinks away to a decorative and
meaningless frieze or is masked behind a band of scrollwork sus-
pended from the eaves. The splendour of the Forbidden City lies
not in its details but, rather, in its rich colour, now wonderfully
mellowed by age, the magnificently simple sweep of its roofs, and
the stupendous scale of its layout. These buildings were all of tim-
ber. A few barrel-vaulted stone or brick temple halls were built in
the sixteenth century but, as before, the use of the vault and dome
was largely confined to tombs, a typical example being the tomb
of the Wan-li emperor in the Western Hills, the excavation of
which, completed in 1958, occupied a team of Chinese archaeol-
ogists for two full years.
Like other invaders before them, the Mongols supported the ART UNDER
THE MONGOLS
Buddhists as a matter of policy. They were particularly attracted
to the esoteric and magical practices of the Tibetan Lamaists, who
were encouraged to set up their temples in Peking. The Buddhist
architecture and sculpture produced by Chinese craftsmen under
their patronage represents no real advance upon that of the Sung,
except perhaps in sheer scale and magnificence. The effect of the
Mongol invasion on painting was far more profound. There were
still Ch'an masters, such as Yen Hui and Yin-t'o-lo, for example,
and professional painters who satisfied the conservative trend in
courtly taste with works in the manner of Ma Yuan or who car-