Constructing Chineseness : translations of architecture into modern China from the mid-nineteenth century to 1949

Abstract

This dissertation examines the history of conceptualization of Chineseness in architecture from the late Qing dynasty (1644 – 1912) to the founding of People’s Republic of China in 1949. It investigates how China’s architectural discourse and built environment translated ancient Chinese architecture and foreign architecture for the conceptual construction of Chineseness of a new architecture. This dissertation begins by tracing the formation of an architectural discourse in late imperial China, which shaped public perceptions of what constituted a new Chinese architecture. Chapter two compares the late Qing architectural discourse against building structures at the Nanyang Industrial Exposition in 1910, which was the last large-scale exposition initiated by the Qing government to showcase its ambition to modernize, to reveal how the late imperial Chinese architectural discourse and built objects constructed different but complementary notions of a new Chinese architecture. This dissertation then examines the ways in which Republican-era Chinese architectural historians and architects continued to shape distinctive meanings of Chineseness. Chapter three focuses on the different versions of Chinese architectural history that Yue Jiazao and Liang Sicheng wrote, which inspired the creation of a new Chinese architecture in distinctive ways. Chapter four investigates how Shanghai and southern China introduced European and American architectural modernism into Republican China, and these places’ different positions on how the modern architectural movement should underpin a new Chinese architecture. This dissertation concludes with an overview of China’s architectural discourse from the founding of People’s Republic of China in 1949 until the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to reveal that Chineseness in architecture did not acquire a fixed definition in Communist China, and constructing Chineseness remains an ongoing project. This dissertation examines architectural texts, images, and built objects to holistically chart how a new Chinese architecture was conceptualized in late imperial and Republican-era China. My work argues that Chineseness in architecture had a fluid conceptual boundary, and it was defined by cross-temporal, cross-geographical, and cross-media translations, rather than a fixed set of characteristics originating from ancient Chinese buildings.