Building Standards, Yingzao fashi《营造法式》
Yingzao fashi (Building Standards) is an important book for research on ancient Chinese architecture. This book is the earliest systematic writing on building standards in China, edited by the scholar official Li Jie (1065-1110) during 1097 to 1100. The Song emperor Zhezong ordered to compile the book so that building construction could be regulated and approachable for both architecture artisans and official supervisors. Li Jie, who was Superintendent for State Buildings since 1092, with information accumulated both from historical documents and the practicing artisans, had made this book into a concise dictionary of the Song architecture. The book includes five parts: a discussion on specific technical vocabularies, standards and regulations for constructions, estimation for labourers and materials, preparation for supplementary materials such as pigments and glazes, and illustrations for carpentry details and decorative patterns. (1) Because of its standardisation of building elements and process, the book had gained great value ever since it was first published in 1103 and was still in use in later dynasties.
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Selected pages from Li Jie ( Li Mingzhong), Building Standards (Yingzao fashi) , 36 chapters in 8 volumes, 33 cm, the edition edited by Tao Xiang, published by Chuanjing shu she, 1925.
李诫编修，《营造法式》，36卷，陶湘重修，传经书社发行， 民国十四年（1925）Source: University of Melbourne, East Asian Collection.
Though the book remained to be valuable, by the early republican period, the Song version of this book (a second edition published in 1145) had only four hand-copies left, which are now respectively preserved in libraries in China and Japan. (2) This printed copy in the University of Melbourne is the second edition printed in the republican period after one of the hand-copies was discovered in 1919. It was revised and edited by the book collector Tao Xiang, still keeping the Song version structure and contents but adding supplementary information from later Qing editions. The renovation of this new version is the great improvement on the illustrations. They were redrawn in a larger size with annotations, and the colours for the patterns were reproduced from annotations in the previous black-and-white copies. (3)
The book became a monumental work for the study of ancient Chinese architectures after the Society for Research in Chinese Architecture was set up in the 1930s and it was under detailed study by early Chinese scholars such as Liang Sicheng. Liang, with his extensive research trips and profound understanding on the timber-frame architecture, has especially located the book as an important work linking architecture styles from the previous Tang to the later Ming-Qing periods. (4) Since then, this book has been a necessity for generations of scholars researching in Chinese architecture history.
Another value of this book is provided by the illustrations. Not only do they include visualised structures for the units and types of timber-frame buildings, there are also the decorative patterns that were used extensively not only on architecture, but also on other media such as relief stone carvings, lacquer and metal works, and even textiles. These patterns are proved to be a useful source for artisans of later generations and is still a comprehensive reference for studies on decorative works in pre-modern China.
By Shiqiu Liu
Notes
1. Guo Qinghua, “Yingzao Fashi: Twelfth-Century Chinese Building Manual,” Architectural History, vol.41 (1998): 5.
2. Fu Xinian, “Chongyin Tao Xiang fangsongkeben Yingzao fashi xu (Preface to the Reprinted Yingzao fashi, Tao Xiang Edition Copying the Song Version),” Zhongguo jianzhushilun huikan
(Collected Papers on the Chinese Architecture History), vol.4 (Beijing: Tsinghua University Press, 2011), 15.
3. Li Shiqiao, “Reconstituting Chinese Building Tradition: the Yingzao fashi in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 62, no.4 (2003): 477.
4. Ibid., 484