Before Liang Sicheng: Yue Jiazao's Chinese architectural history

Abstract

Universal acknowledgement of Liang Sicheng as the patriarch of Chinese architectural history buries an inconvenient truth: namely, that his Zhongguo jianzhu shi was not the first modern architectural history of China written by a Chinese scholar. This paper focuses on the previously unexplored legacy of the Qing scholar Yue Jiazao and his 1933 work, Zhongguo jianzhu shi, within the broader context of early twentieth century China. Re-examination of the book's publication, the motives behind its production, and the critical response it provoked reveals a fascinating new intersection within the expanding field of Chinese architectural history: namely, the emergence of China's building traditions as worthy of Chinese intellectual pursuit and public discourse.

As the first Chinese attempt to detail the country's imperial architectural development, Yue's book binds basic Chinese architectural archetypes together through a rich connective tissue of classical Chinese literary allusion as well as Yue's own, somewhat unreliable memories of the country's most notable monuments. As a late Qing reformer and later a faculty member within Beijing University's Department of Architecture, Yue's unique background informed and shaped the book's content in important and unusual ways. The result offered a distinctively impressionistic study of the country's architectural heritage.

Yue's book is an admittedly and fundamentally flawed piece of scholarship, prompting a vitriolic public dismissal by Liang himself in 1934. It is, however, in the book's crucial shortcomings that its paradoxical scholarly value may be found. Yue employed a novel and alternative methodological approach to the dominant, archaeologically-focused pedagogy preached by foreign, and foreign-trained Chinese, architects at the time. In doing so, he unwittingly sparked a very public, and uniquely Chinese, polemic within an emerging and uncertain field still coming to terms with its own cultural, political, and social significance. Reevaluating the largely unexamined history of Yue's work thus represents a new conceptual touchstone beyond the shadow of Liang's own, powerful legacy that challenges our current understanding of the field's origins and its subsequent development.