Vocabulary of Vernacular Architecture

This section presents Quanzhou's Vernacular Architecture as a set of characteristic elements which occur repeatedly throughout the residential environment of the Old City. This thematic approach is an alternative and a complement to the presentation of specific places in the section on Characteristic Neighborhoods and Streets.

The elements of Quanzhou's vernacular building style are organized here according to the scale at which they can best be appreciated, in order from the largest to the smallest scale:

Finally, following the index of these elements on this page, there is a further note on the method used to categorize them.

Urban Forms

At the scale of the streets and public spaces, these are the forms which are the result of public, collective, or multiple private acts of building:

Streetscapes
Arcades
Waterways
Infrastructure
Small Neighborhood Temples

Common Housing Types

At the scale of individual buildings, these are the dominant types of dwelling and their variations that have evolved in Quanzhou over many generations; it is through them that individual builders make their most important impact on the cityscape:

Wide Gong Ting Courtyard Houses
Narrow Shou Jin Liao Courtyard Houses
"Western-style" Villas
Shophouses
Work-unit Apartments
Transitional and Hybrid Forms
Speculative Housing and Shophousing

Building Forms

At a scale smaller than an entire building, these are the complex building parts which occur in many different types of dwellings, and which in themselves possess features characteristic of Quanzhou's vernacular architecture; they can be considered as the important spatial "pieces" which make up the dwelling:

Roofs
Terraces and Setbacks
Porches and Balconies
Gardens
Gates
Courts and Passages

Architectural Details

These are the physical or structural elements of buildings and urban spaces. The list included here is not exhaustive, but contains those elements whose particular style contributes most strongly to Quanzhou's vernacular building tradition. At the same time, most of these elements are in general common to other domestic building traditions, and they are listed in this way to invite comparison:

Columns, Beams and Arches
Walls
Gables
Roofing
Overhangs
Windows
Doors
Steps and Thresholds
Paving and Flooring
Screens, Grilles and Brises-soleil
Railings, Balusters, Coping and Rainspouts
Furnishings
Signs and Symbols

Building Materials

Finally, these are the actual materials out of which Quanzhou's vernacular buildings and urban spaces are made. There is alot of overlap with the list of Architectural Details above, but the emphasis here is on the juxtaposition, color, and texture of the materials themselves rather than the way they are used to build buildings or define spaces.

Red Brick, including:

Swallowtail Brick
Special Bond Brick
Brick Paving

Granite, including:

Granite Wall
Granite Wall Base
Granite Quoining
Granite Paving

Ru Shi Chu Zhuan (mixed granite and brick)
Wood Structure
Wood Finish
Earth
Reinforced Concrete
Ceramics, including:

Terracotta Roofs
Terracotta Floors
Decorative Glazed Ceramic
Glazed Tile Roofs
Glazed Tile Walls
Stucco

A Further Note on the Method of Categorization

The hierarchical list of elements of Quanzhou's architectural "language" presented in these pages is designed to invite comparison between this "language" and the language used in other architectural traditions. For example, virtually all building traditions make use of "roofs," "doors" and "windows." As in any place, it is the particular way that these elements are created that make up Quanzhou's special style. Moreover, this way of describing and categorizing architecture is familiar to most people. It is intuitive, and does not require a great deal of explanation.

On the other hand, this approach is particularly suited to Quanzhou's tradition, and is possibly less suited to the traditions of other regions in China. In the tradition of planned capital cities exemplified by Beijing, for example, the city's overall form is governed by a strict orthogonal axiality which is mirrored in the form of individual dwellings; all are closely intertwined in a hierarchically nested network of walls, gates and courtyards. Even in the unplanned, irregularly-formed villages and small cities of varied regions throughout China, traditionally there has always been a close relation between the form of the house and the form of the settlement; a tightly cohesive system that encompasses both public and private space, water and land, open spaces and enclosures. Finally, whether in the capital or in the villages, Chinese dwellings are traditionally inward-looking, and turn a neutral, relatively colorless face to the public space of the street.

All of these factors would suggest that the application of a set of discrete elements to describe most Chinese vernacular building traditions would fall far short of the goal, especially when attempting to describe these traditions as experienced from the public space. Rather, what would be needed is a description of the entire spatial system, including the rules that almost seamlessly govern the whole settlement from its siting and general form, all the way down to the arrangement of rooms around an internal court and even the placing of furniture in a room. The pseudo-geomantic system of feng shui is one example of such a set of rules.

The city of Quanzhou offers quite a different case. Certainly feng shui and other traditional rules systems have shaped Quanzhou's development. Although the author of these pages has encountered no documentation to show that those who originally laid out the city were intentionally following principles of feng shui, the city's relation to the surrounding mountains, the river and the sea are remarkably in accordance with those principles. At the level of the individual household, there is no question that feng shui continues to guide many building decisions, as examples here of particular household types attest.

But between the considerations of individual households, and the original siting of the city in the landscape, Quanzhou is a remarkably diverse and non-uniform city compared with most Chinese building vernaculars. The city is made up of a riot of contrasting building types whose internal spatial order has little to do with the form of the city overall, which itself largely developed along an unplanned path and possesses an irregular form.

It was therefore necessary to use a kind of "common denominator" system of categorization. The miracle is that even using such a method of description, Quanzhou's particular architectural identity emerges bright and clear.