Tang Timber Frame Architecture

China had developed a tradition of timber-frame architecture likely since the Han Dynasty. Unfortunately, due to the erosion of the woods and the destruction of fire, wooden structures rarely survive for hundreds of years. Even worse, with the modernizing movements from the early 20th century, the removal of what's feudal and superstitious was prevalent, harming the preservation of architecture. There is not any surviving timber-frame architecture prior to the Tang Dynasty still standing today. Yet, tombs, murals and stone structures do endure the test of time. Under the direction of the founding fathers of China's architectural studies -- Liang Sicheng 梁思成 and Liu Dunzhen 刘敦桢 -- the discovery of Tang timber-frame buildings provides us with

Monk Xuanzang imported tons of scrolls of sutras from his traveling to India, and those texts were kept in their original language -- primarily Sanskrit -- and were not distributed to the general Buddhist followers. In order to securely store the sutras, make them readily accessible for a larger audience, and foster inner nature of the monks, translating and copying Buddhist sutra gradually became a common practice for the temples to carry on. Translating and copying needed space and storage (for papers and finished collections), so that specially reserved buildings for this purpose were added into the temple plan, as seen in the Dunhuang Caves murals as well as the new additions to the Foguang Temple. This practice left a legacy that library occupies an essential architectural presence in all the temples built by the subsequent

Just as the appearance of the standing temples today, elegant, grand, uniform, delicate, and spanned, so does the architecture on the Dunhuang images exhibit a consistent outlook. In the pictures that surround the religious motifs are the depiction of the mundane life of the Tang. Buildings are in cardinal and white, with modular bays and multi-step bracket sets. Sometimes, fortresses and corridors in a quadrangle were pained with detail as well. From the visual analysis of the murals, it was evident that beyond individual structure whose styles and methods of construction were generally reflective of the Tang's hierarchical color scheme and aesthetics of Buddhist or Daoist beliefs, the complexity of the architecture or a series of related architecture can be enormous. Multiple courts and palaces shown in the murals have numerous pavilions connected by gabled roof corridors; multi-story towers or mansions were the forming the skyline. The Dunhuang murals revealed that the scale of institutions and architectural assembly was likely to mirror the strong financial condition of the Tang as a whole and forest techniques of erecting structurally complicated buildings. Besides buildings, gardens and plantation were a constituent of the complex, inheriting the practices from the North and South Dynasties. Dunhuang Caves'