Biography of Fu Xinian 傅熹年

Steinhardt, Nancy S.

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Biography of Fu Xinian 傅熹年

Nancy S. Steinhardt

Traditional Chinese Architecture: Twelve Essays

~Fu Xinian was born in January 1933 into a highly educated family who traced its origins to the town of Jiang’an in Sichuan province. In middle school, Fu came across articles by Liang Sicheng (1901–1972) about Chinese architecture and the city of Beijing. He was immediately drawn to this field that seemed to him, even in his youth, to be the...

Author

Nancy S. Steinhardt

PublisherPrinceton University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23697

Biography of Fu Xinian 傅熹年

Fu Xinian was born in January 1933 into a highly educated family who traced its origins to the town of Jiang’an in Sichuan province. In middle school, Fu came across articles by Liang Sicheng (1901–1972) about Chinese architecture and the city of Beijing. He was immediately drawn to this field that seemed to him, even in his youth, to be the perfect union of traditional China and contemporary society. Not only did that decision more than seventy years ago shape the direction of Fu Xinian’s life, his unparalleled study of Chinese architecture molded a field of research for more than sixty years.

In 1951 Fu passed the entrance exam for the Department (now School) of Architecture at Tsinghua (Qinghua) University. During his four years there, he majored in industrial building. In March 1956 he began to work in the Architecture Division of the Construction and Building Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Harbin, in Heilongjiang province of far northeastern China.

In September of that year Fu was sent back to the Department of Architecture at Tsinghua, where he worked under the supervision of Liang Sicheng as a trainee in the Architectural History and Theory Research Center. This allowed him to fulfill the dream of his youth, to study traditional Chinese architecture under the man whose writings had led him to his career path. In spring 1957 Fu became Liang’s assistant. For his first project, “The Architectural History of the Last Hundred Years of Beijing,” Fu’s job was to collect relevant literature and documents, to take photographs and measurements of buildings, and to draw architectural plans. One of the high points for Fu was the opportunity to report his findings directly to Liang. Wang Qiming (1929–), then a doctoral candidate under Liang, also participated in this project.

In early 1958 Tsinghua University closed its Architectural History and Theory Research Institute, and the staff members who had come to Beijing from the Harbin branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences were transferred to the Chinese Architectural Theory and History Research Institute at the Architectural Technology Research Center (today China Architecture and Design Research Group), which was attached to the Ministry of Works. Following the Anti-Rightist Movement, Fu was falsely accused of having been a right-wing supporter during his time at the Department of Architecture at Tsinghua. Beginning in 1959 he was reeducated at a labor farm associated with the Ministry of Works. During this period he managed to read the twenty-four-volume (more than two million characters) Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive mirror to aid in government, 1086), the magisterial history of China. In October 1960 Fu was allowed to return to the Architectural Theory and History Research Institute.

Beginning in 1961 Fu Xinian participated in a survey of folk houses in Zhejiang province that was published in Chinese as Zhejiang minju. Wang Qiming and Shang Kuo, Fu’s former classmates at Tsinghua, were in charge of the project. The photos of the largely dilapidated folk houses were not as impressive as sketches of them in pen and ink or survey plans, which ended up being the methods of presentation. The project continued into 1963. In the same year they took the project into the adjacent province of Fujian. It was terminated during the Four Cleanups Movement in 1964. However, the Zhejiang and Fujian surveys had enabled Fu to deepen his knowledge of vernacular architecture, and the large number of hand-drawn sketches and maps provided an opportunity to improve his ability to draw. Since he had first come across his mentor’s pencil sketches in the 1940s, Fu had been inspired by Liang Sicheng’s masterful ability to draw. Masterful draftsmanship became a signature trait of all Fu’s work from this point on. This unique ability to present what is most important about a building in an ink design, including an unequaled reliability to accurately render a theoretical reconstruction, is as powerful as Fu Xinian’s understanding and perception of how to write Chinese architectural history. Fu’s drawings, like those of his teachers Liang Sicheng and Liu Dunzhen (1897–1968), continue to dominate Chinese architectural publications in China. We have decided to illustrate this book exclusively with Fu’s ink work so that it not only transmits his understanding of the field as it has been offered to students in China but also adds a level of understanding unique in Fu’s Chinese writings.

Also beginning early in 1963, Fu Xinian, Wang Shiren (1934–), and Yang Naiji (1934–) took part in Liu Dunzhen’s compilation project Zhongguo gudai jianzhushi (History of Chinese traditional architecture), a survey history whose subsequent editions are still used in introductory courses. Fu’s main tasks were to draw plans, review and check research material, and add notes and annotations. Because of the scarcity of extant pre-Song (960–1279) buildings, Liu also asked Fu to study important sites whose architecture was known to have been lost, and to make reconstruction drawings as references for this project that from its inception was conceived as the presentation of the Chinese architectural canon in the 1960s. It distinguished itself from Liang Sicheng’s and Liu Dunzhen’s work of the 1930s and 1940s because nearly fifteen years of government-sponsored excavation were incorporated into it. Important buildings investigated for this project by Fu Xinian were Linde Hall, Hanyuan Hall, Xuanwu Gate, and Chongxuan Gate of the Tang palace complex Daminggong, a site still under investigation and reconstruction in the 2010s and the subject of an essay here.

The project was an opportunity for Fu to work directly under Liu Dunzhen. Liu began by showing the young researcher his collated manuscript of the Forbidden City edition of the twelfth-century architectural manual Yingzao fashi (Building standards), the basis for understanding the Chinese construction system since the twelfth century and some earlier aspects of the tradition. Liu was moved by the work of this young researcher who beyond college and one subsequent year at Tsinghua had been largely self-taught. Liu offered Fu some of his own research materials and took him under his wing. The unique insights of Liu’s ten years of education and work in Japan, the skill and patience for which his teaching had been recognized since his return to China in 1922, and his high expectations for his students gave Fu insights into the field of architectural history, profession of architecture, historic preservation, and fieldwork that had not been part of his previous experiences.

In early 1965, when the Four Cleanups Movement had ended, the History Research Institute decided to close the Architectural Research Institute. Most staff members were sent outside Beijing. The two directors, Liang Sicheng and Liu Dunzhen, were embroiled in their own political struggles and thus unable to prevent this. Fortunately they proposed keeping the books and retaining the field and research notes from its years of operation, and they raised the possibility that some members of their staff would be permitted to pursue their profession. Fu Xinian was one of the staff whose careers they attempted to save. He was allowed to stay in Beijing and was sent on temporary assignment to Wenwu (Cultural Relics) Press, still today the premier publisher of Chinese books and periodicals relevant to material remains. At Wenwu Press, Fu worked under the guidance of Chen Mingda (1914–1997), a man trained as an assistant by Liang Sicheng. Born after Liang and Liu and before Fu, Chen did not have the opportunity for a formal university education. As a result his working style is sometimes described as down-to-earth, but his precision as an excavator and theoretical reconstructor, and his almost unmatched ability to rigorously read and analyze classical documents, including Yingzao fashi, combined with his ability as a carpenter-builder offered the collaboration with Fu those few, practical aspects of the profession of Chinese architectural historian that Liang and Liu did not possess.

Upon the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Fu Xinian worked as a plumber for three years. In 1970 he was assigned to a labor camp known as the May Seventh Cadre School, where he became a technician in the Fifth Engineering Company of the Seventh Construction Bureau run by Tianshui Construction Commission of Gansu province. Anytime he was not working, Fu studied Yingzao fashi. Much of his analytical research and many of his schematic drawings published from the late 1970s onward were completed during this period. In 1971, still a period of high intensity in the Cultural Revolution, the Cultural Relics Bureau decided to perform maintenance and repair work on the Maijishan Grottoes, located just outside Tianshui. Fu Xinian was temporarily assigned to surveying and mapping. He seized this opportunity. If it was not clear to Fu initially, his work measuring and sketching every significant cave, exterior and interior, including sculpture and murals, was a turning point in his own career and the future study of Chinese architecture. Having not drawn for several years, Fu Xinian regained his skill at the age of thirty-eight at a site that thereafter became the most important one for documentation of wooden building styles before the earliest extant wooden structure, dated to 782. Like the work on Daminggong mentioned above, Fu’s seminal article on Maijishan is translated here. Also like Daminggong, through the subsequent centuries Maijishan has remained one of the most important sites for the study of Chinese architecture.

In the summer of 1972 Fu Xinian was transferred back to Beijing to help prepare for an exhibition that was to travel abroad. His work included drawing ground plans. Thereupon he was allowed to return to his original profession. Fu’s drawings for the exhibition included reconstructions of historical sites based on excavation plans, including the Yuan-period mansion Houyingfang in Beijing and the above-mentioned Hanyuan Hall at the Daming palace complex in Xi’an. Articles written about Hanyuan Hall became the first papers published under Fu’s own name after the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late 1960s to 1970s.

In 1972 the Construction Commission of the State Council of the Architectural Technology Research Center resumed the study of architectural history. Liu Dunzhen and Chen Mingda, both senior to Fu, returned to their previous positions under the leadership of Liu Xiangzhen (1922–2002). Liu and several staff members hoped that Fu would be able to return to work also. Despite the personal approval of Yuan Jingshen (1919–), director of the institute, their request was denied because Fu was identified as a former “rightist.” In early 1975, during a report to comrade Gu Mu (1914–2009), then vice president of China, entitled “The Commenting on Confucianism and Criticizing Legalism (Movement),” Yuan Jingshen and several other participants at a meeting on this document raised to Gu the topic of Fu’s return. The request was approved. In March 1975 Fu Xinian returned to his old job and thereupon was able to officially continue his study of architectural history.

After resuming his work at the Architectural Technology Research Center, Fu participated in the compilation of several of the most seminal publications in Chinese architectural history. It was a time of frenzy, momentum, and elation for a field that had lain dormant and might have disappeared or been pushed aside by the practical concerns of a nation in the process of reconstructing so many of its buildings. The research of men like Fu Xinian during years of forced labor meant that his office was poised to produce works such as the architecture volume of Zhongguo dabaike quanshu (Encyclopedia Sinica) and Beijing gujianzhu (Premodern architecture in Beijing). Fu also focused on several specific topics that had been left aside, such as the survey of extant Song-Yuan architecture in Fujian, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu that had begun in 1961–1963. During this period of research on southeastern Chinese architecture, Fu learned that the Japanese “Great Buddha style” and “Zen style” of construction had originated from regional styles in use in southeastern China during the Song and Yuan periods. Fu’s work on this subject also is represented by one of the essays translated here. Fu in addition did his pathbreaking work on the Jin dynasty murals at Yanshan Monastery in northern Shanxi, dated 1153, in which he associated specific paintings of buildings with halls of the imperial city. That long, technical study was deemed too specific for inclusion here, but Fu’s ability to use paintings of architecture to elucidate and reconstruct actual buildings is represented by the shorter essay about Wang Ximeng’s painting. Fu also fulfilled a personal commitment at this time. He prepared for publication unpublished manuscripts of his father, Fu Zhongmo (1905–1974), and his grandfather, Fu Zengxiang (1872–1949). Zhongmo had been a specialist in ancient jade, and Zengxiang, a scholar and official at the Qing court, was the director of the library in the Forbidden City. This family history of course had been a factor in Fu Xinian’s situation in the 1960s and 1970s. Upon completing the publications relevant to his ancestors in the early 1990s, Fu Xinian was able to dedicate the rest of his life to Chinese architectural history.

Fu’s focus during the early 1990s was threefold: First, he conducted extensive research on Chinese architecture from the period of the Three Kingdoms through the Five Dynasties (220–960), the time frame of his volume of the five-volume Zhongguo gudai jianzhu shi (History of premodern Chinese architecture). Second, Fu began to look at the development of the field of Chinese architectural history during the seventy-year period that began with the return of Liu Dunzhen and Liang Sicheng to China. He asked himself what aspects of the design of a city, a building cluster, or even a single building could be considered formative or typical of the Chinese building tradition; and how social and human factors influenced architecture. Third, Fu turned to the two texts that were most influential in the history of Chinese architecture, Yingzao fashi and the eighteenth-century Gongcheng zuofa (Engineering methods), studying their complex and often terse semantics in detail. One essay in this book represents that work.

Fu also began a new kind of study of Beijing at this time. He began by making a 1:500-scale map of Beijing. Through this complicated exercise Fu first discovered that the width (east-west dimension) of the city in imperial times equaled 9 times that of the Forbidden City, and the north-south length was 5.5 times that of the Forbidden City. Fu then mapped the city on a coordinate grid. He realized that the grid lines coincided with many of the current vertical and horizontal roads or at least were very close to them. This suggested that the base dimensions of individual palace complexes in the Forbidden City had a numerical relationship with the layout of the larger capital around them. Extending this research to state altars (such as the Altar [Temple] of Heaven), he discovered that inside the Forbidden City, every main palace complex used the area dimensions of the Inner Court’s principal building cluster, the Two Back Halls (Houlianggong), as its module, and the Altar of Heaven complex built in the early Ming period used the area dimensions of the high earthen platform beneath its main structure, Great Sacrifice Hall (Dasidian), as the module. This research confirmed not only that there was an individual Chinese building module, as is documented and had long been understood through study of Yingzao fashi, but also that the concept of modularity as the basis for Chinese construction extended to building units as large as cities. Fu next discovered that the placement of individual buildings within a group is plotted so that the main building is almost always in the geometrical center of the entire plan of a building complex or a city. The explanations of plotting according to centrality and modularity in imperial cities and for altars in Beijing are the subjects of essays 8 and 12 here.

Next, based on the data retrieved from this comprehensive and accurate mapping of Beijing, in which Zhang Bo (1911–1999) aided, Fu discovered that each architectural complex aligned with Beijing’s main north-south or east-west axis was built on a modular grid with fixed dimensions for certain building units. For example, the variously sized architectural compounds in the Forbidden City such as the Ancestral Temple and the Altars to Soil and Grain were based on modules and planned on square grids with units of 10, 5, or 3 zhang (one zhang = 3.184 meters in the Ming dynasty).

From here Fu Xinian turned to research on the technical rules that were applied to capital city planning and large-scale architectural layout in the Ming-Qing period more generally. He also investigated extant Tang and Song architecture to see if the same kind of modular bases could be applied. He confirmed that in spite of differences in construction, worse states of preservation, and many fewer extant buildings, a modular basis was behind the architecture of important buildings and imperial cities as early as the Tang dynasty.

During this investigation Fu also discovered that proportional relationships had been used for the sectional elevation of individual buildings. He found that until the Song dynasty, the vertical rise of the roof of a four-rafter building (and, in the case of buildings deeper than four rafters, the height of the middle roof purlins) measured twice the height of the lower eaves columns, whereas by the Yuan dynasty, the vertical rise of the roof of a six-rafter building (and, in the case of buildings deeper than six rafters, the height of the upper roof purlins) measured twice the height of the lower eaves columns. Most extant buildings match these ratios or are very close to them. By drawing elevation diagrams, Fu further noticed that the total building width was almost always a multiple of the height of the lower eaves columns. This showed the decisive role the lower eaves column height played in sectional and elevation design: it was in essence an expanded design module.

Based on these new findings, Fu widened the scope of his research and launched a project entitled “Zhongguo Gudai Chengshi Guihua, Jianzhuqun Buju ji Jianzhu Sheji Fangfa Yanjiu” (Research methods for Chinese traditional city planning, architectural cluster layout, and building design), which was published in 2001 as a two-volume work under the same title. His research demonstrated that by the sixth century, if not earlier, a continuously advancing system of design methods took shape based on basic and expanded modules and a modular grid to determine the plan, layout, and design of buildings, building units, and imperial cities. Pushing this research further, Fu sought relations between the formation of typical architectural features and underlying patterns and human factors. He defined human factors as classical thought, ethical (Confucian) concepts, the ritual system, folk traditions, and religion.

Ideas that came into Fu’s writing in the late 1990s and early 2000s included that the capital city used the area of the palace-city as its module; the variously sized palace compounds inside the administrative-city of the capital used the area of the emperor’s residential palace as their module; and thus architecture demonstrated that the emperor was the supreme ruler and all under Heaven was under his control. Or, positioning of the main building of a palace compound in the geometric center is a good example of the concept of zezhong (the ubiquitous preference for centrality of the kingdom in writings of China’s Classical age [first millennium BCE]). Or, not only did palace compounds of different ranks and scales use modular grids of varying unit sizes, but in addition the sizes reflected the strict hierarchy of Chinese society. This kind of thinking pervades writing about Chinese architecture today, but for those who had tried to preserve scholarly research in the 1960s and first part of the 1970s, the association between construction and social values of China’s Classical age was “revolutionary.” When Fu Xinian sought support from China’s National Science Foundation to pursue this kind of research agenda, he was not successful. Much later in his career he returned to these topics.

Reflecting on his more than sixty years of research, Fu Xinian writes that architectural history is a branch of learning that requires wide-ranging textual research as well as on-site investigation, and that it is best accomplished by collaboration not only with one’s colleagues but also with scholarship of China’s past. Still hard at work at age eighty-three when he was interviewed for this introduction, Fu Xinian modestly said that among the most auspicious circumstances of his career were the opportunites to know and work with China’s First Generation, including, of course, Liang Sicheng and Liu Dunzhen. The editor, the translator, and many other architectural historians of China have been privileged to experience Fu Xinian’s tutelage in the same way. It is our hope that this book will bring this man’s unique understanding of Chinese architecture and equally unique ability to communicate three-quarters of a century of research and knowledge about it to a far broader audience. Thereby Fu Xinian’s legacy will be the next crucial stage in opening a field for which research on the highest level until now has been locked except for the few who are able to read the scholarship of Fu Xinian and others in Chinese and the Classical texts behind it.

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