Editor’s Note

Steinhardt, Nancy S.

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Editor’s Note

Nancy S. Steinhardt

Traditional Chinese Architecture: Twelve Essays

~The translation of these essays was a many-step process that occurred over a five-year period. It began with selection of the essays, a choice made in consultation with senior scholars in China and the United States who both have read the majority of Fu Xinian’s oeuvre and are equally familiar with Chinese scholarship on Chinese architecture...

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Nancy S. Steinhardt

PublisherPrinceton University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23694

Editor’s Note

The translation of these essays was a many-step process that occurred over a five-year period. It began with selection of the essays, a choice made in consultation with senior scholars in China and the United States who both have read the majority of Fu Xinian’s oeuvre and are equally familiar with Chinese scholarship on Chinese architecture since the 1920s. The decision, especially to eliminate several seminal writings that have influenced modern scholarship and understanding of Chinese architectural history, was based on the technical level of architectural vocabulary; primary source material behind those essays; ability to convey what we determined necessary for a reader who would study them through the line drawings here but had not seen the buildings or sites; and in several cases, length, or how much it would be possible to cut from the English translation to keep the word length of this book manageable while still offering the reader the significance and impact of Fu’s work. Our goal has been to inform an English-reading audience who, we hope, has read a survey of Chinese architecture, will read such a book or take an introductory course on the subject, or has spent enough time in China to have seen buildings beyond China’s major cities and sites.

The second step was to achieve as accurate a translation as possible. This was done by Alexandra Harrer, who consulted with colleagues at Tsinghua University and with Fu himself when any ambiguity arose. I checked that translation and then rewrote the book based on it for the primary purpose of readability for our designated audience. The majority of cutting from Fu’s original essays took place at that time. The editing decisions were based on the same points mentioned above. I have at each stage sought to convey what, based on more than thirty years of teaching and lecturing about Chinese architectural history, I believe is most likely to spark an interest in a reader to continue the study of this subject, whether through primary source research, broader reading in Asian and European languages, coursework, or travel and study in China. It was also decided at this stage to eliminate Fu Xinian’s original endnotes. Many of them were no longer relevant, usually because they addressed technicalities that had been eliminated or because more recent scholarship was more pertinent. Adding new notes to replace the original ones would have required enough rewriting of the text that, when we experimented with this, we concluded that we were deviating too far from Fu’s original goals in writing each essay. Instead of unsatisfactory notes that became explanations for why we had eliminated something, we decided not to have notes but instead to add a few titles in which the reader could find more information on the most significant points. To clarify what we considered most important, I wrote an introductory paragraph for each chapter. The short bibliography for each essay includes widely used English sources for textual information mentioned in the essays, recent books in Chinese and English, a few articles, and books in which color pictures of the buildings discussed are available.

The choice of essays also was made with an eye toward the twenty-first-century reader. Eleven of the essays are as crucial to understanding the field today as they were when Fu conducted his initial research, and yet by 2016 no similar discussion except in an East Asian language was available on the topic. The one exception, perhaps, is essay 6. We decided to include an essay on Daminggong because it exemplifies the continuing study and resulting new understanding of a site based on ongoing excavation, a process that a reader should anticipate for any major monument or site in China. It is, moreover, a site that a reader is likely to know about from an introductory study of Chinese architecture. We thus provide here one example of the kind of controversy that moves, excites, and sometimes incites the field. The study of Daminggong underscores the fact that the study of old buildings in China is dynamic.

The next stages of the book involved checking of my new manuscript by Alexandra Harrer, my checking of her queries, returning the manuscript to her with my further emendations and questions, and again consultations with colleagues in China. By that point a third version of the text, one that was significantly shorter than the original, was produced. I had also limited Fu’s drawings to about 120, our target number, and labeled them in English. We also had a glossary of thousands of Chinese architectural terms. We knew at every stage how important the glossary would be. It went through more revisions and consultations with colleagues than the manuscript. At one time we included phrases that were not directly related to architecture but for which we anticipated a Chinese reader might want to know why the English read as it did. Most instances of this last kind of entry have since been eliminated because, in the end, this is a book about Chinese architecture for a non-Chinese reader, not a scholarly, word-for-word translation of a scholar’s essays.

The questions of complete translation, notes, and glossary also were raised by two external readers to whom we owe tremendous thanks. Both, I am certain, have read all the essays here in Fu’s original form and read both Chinese and English fluently. Like endnotes, the glossary was discussed in each conversation I had with editors at Princeton University Press. In the end, we decided not to include an English-Chinese glossary, primarily for two reasons. First, although we anticipate that the glossary will have stand-alone use for anyone reading Chinese architectural material in Chinese, it is far from complete. With just a few exceptions, we have included only the terms that occur in Fu’s essays and that we have used at least one time in pinyin Romanization in our translation. Second, we often offer an explanation for a term as well as a one-or two-word definition. Many of the Chinese terms do not lend themselves to direct translation, nor would it be accurate to use our English single-word translation without additional lengthy explanations about why something is and sometimes is not the accepted name of the term through the course of Western architectural history.

Finally, we have eliminated characters from the text so that someone with no knowledge of Chinese is not distracted by what would sometimes be a very high level of frequency on a given page. We have added the Chinese terms in Romanization after the English translation at the first usage, and sometimes later in the book. Later inclusions are because a term used earlier, whether in the same essay or in a different one, is crucial and there is no assumption that every essay is read or that the book is read in sequence, or in some cases that a reader will remember it from thirty pages earlier in the same essay. Finally, we have included in the glossary both complete and simplified forms of characters. Works from the 1950s onward, and thus Fu Xinian’s original essays, generally are in simplified characters. Yet the original sources of his terminology, whether in Classical or modern Chinese, are usually in complete-form characters.

Alexandra Harrer and I look forward to correspondence with readers who have questions about anything that follows. All editorial decisions have been mine.

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