Writing liminality: Yue Jiazao’s Chinese Architectural History

Abstract

This paper focuses on the previously unexplored legacy of the late Qing scholar Yue Jiazao and his 1933 work, Zhongguo jianzhu shi, within the cultural and political milieus of late Qing and early Republican China. Although it represents the first Chinese attempt to comprehensively craft the country’s imperial architectural development into history, the book’s immediate and public dismissal by Liang Sicheng in a 1934 review continues to impact its scholarly reception today. As I will argue, however, it is through the purportedly significant shortcomings of Yue’s scholarship, coupled with Liang’s acerbic response to the work, that important cultural and intellectual shifts in the study of architectural history in China may be detected. The book’s organizational structure, which 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 Beijing’s most notable monuments situates it within the realm of Qing Evidential Studies scholarship (kaozheng xue 考證學). At the same time, however, understanding the motives behind its production, its striking resistance to the allure of the material-situated methodologies then employed by foreign as well as foreign-trained Chinese architects like Liang, and the unmeasured, vitriolic nature of its critique each help to re-position the work within a uniquely Republican-era architectural discursive context. In this respect, we may see the work as marking an important epistemological intersection within the field of early twentieth-century Chinese architectural historiography.