Asian buildings

History and fun facts

China: courtyard houses in Beijing

A siheyuan is a courtyard house with four buildings around a courtyard. The name means roughly 'four-sided courtyard'. In Beijing they stood along the narrow alleys, the hutongs. Most surviving houses date from the Ming and Qing periods (1368 to 1912). The main hall stood on the north side and faced south, towards the sun. The eldest of the family lived there.

• The gate is often in the south-east corner rather than in the middle. Behind it stands a screen wall, so you cannot look in from the street.
• Richer houses had two or more courtyards behind each other, separated by an ornamental gate.
• Many hutongs have been demolished, but around the Drum Tower and Nanluoguxiang you can still see them.

China: tulou in Fujian

Tulou are large round or square earth strongholds in the mountains of Fujian, built of rammed earth. Hakka and Minnan families built them, mostly from the 17th century on. A whole clan lived together behind one thick wall with only one gate. Kitchens were on the ground floor, storage above them and bedrooms at the top.

• Since 2008, 46 tulou together have been on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
• Chengqi Lou from 1709 has four rings inside each other and is called the king of the tulou.
• Windows sit only high up in the wall. That made the building easy to defend at the bottom.
• In the middle there is often an ancestral hall, the place for celebrations and remembrance.

China: the Forbidden City and gardens

The Forbidden City in Beijing was built from 1406 to 1420 and was the palace of the emperors for almost 500 years. The largest hall is the Hall of Supreme Harmony. It stands on a three-tiered white marble terrace and has a double-eaved hipped roof with yellow tiles. Yellow was the emperor's colour.

• Rows of small figures stand on the corners of the roof. The Hall of Supreme Harmony has ten, more than any other building.
• The wooden brackets under the roof (dougong) carry the heavy roof without nails.
• The gardens of Suzhou, World Heritage since 1997, have pavilions and moon gates. A round gate frames the view like a painting.

Ancient China: Han farmsteads and watchtowers

Almost no wooden buildings survive from the Han dynasty (206 BC to AD 220). We still know what they looked like, because pottery models were placed in tombs. They show walled farmsteads and tall watchtowers with balconies and little roofs on every storey.

• The models already show brackets under the roofs, just like later palaces.
• Such models are on display in many museums, also in Europe.
• Some models even have a pigsty with a toilet above it.

Korea: hanok, choga and Gwanghwamun

A hanok is a traditional Korean house; most well-known examples date from the Joseon period (1392 to 1897). The house stands on a stone base, has wooden posts and a heavy tiled roof with a graceful concave line. Under the floor is ondol: smoke from the kitchen fire passes under a stone floor to a chimney and so heats the rooms. For summer there is the maru, an open wooden floor.

• Ordinary farmers lived in a choga with a roof of rice straw. In the 1970s many thatched roofs were replaced with sheet metal and tiles.
• Bukchon in Seoul and the villages of Hahoe and Yangdong (World Heritage since 2010) still have many old houses.
• Gwanghwamun is the main gate of Gyeongbokgung Palace from 1395. The gate has been destroyed and rebuilt many times, most recently completed in 2010.

Japan: minka, machiya and tea houses

Minka are the houses of farmers and merchants. In the mountain villages of Shirakawa-go and Gokayama (World Heritage since 1995) stand gassho houses with very steep thatched roofs, so the snow slides off. Silkworms were raised in the attics. In cities such as Kyoto merchants built machiya: narrow on the street, with a shop at the front and living rooms and a little garden at the back.

• Villagers replaced a thatched roof together, sometimes with hundreds of people at once.
• The famous tea master Sen no Rikyu (16th century) made tea houses small and simple. The Taian tea room has only two tatami mats.
• The low crawl-in door, the nijiriguchi, makes everyone bow. Inside, everyone is equal.

Japan: castle keeps

Japanese castles have a tall keep, the tenshu, on a sloping base of stacked stones (ishigaki). The stone base flares out at the bottom and gets steep at the top, so attackers find it hard to climb. The wooden storeys were protected against fire with white plaster.

• Himeji Castle, finished in 1609, is called the White Heron and has been on the World Heritage List since 1993.
• Matsumoto Castle is black instead and is called the Crow Castle.
• Only twelve castles still have their original wooden keep from before 1868.
• The tiger-headed fish on the ridge, shachihoko, were meant to protect the castle against fire.

Ancient Japan: the Yayoi period

In the Yayoi period, roughly from the first millennium BC to about AD 300, wet rice farming came to Japan. People lived in pit dwellings (tateana): a shallow pit with a reed roof on posts that came down to the ground. They stored rice in granaries on stilts (takayuka), with boards on the posts against mice.

• At Yoshinogari on Kyushu a large Yayoi village with moats, palisades and lookout towers has been rebuilt.
• The raised granaries look like the oldest Shinto shrines, such as those at Ise.
• Pit dwellings had already been built in Japan thousands of years earlier, in the Jomon period.

Vietnam: stilt houses, tube houses and the dinh

In the mountains of northern Vietnam, peoples such as the Tay, Thai and Muong live in stilt houses (nha san). Under the house there is room for animals and tools, people live dry and safe above. In the Central Highlands the Ede build longhouses for large families. In Hanoi's old quarter stand tube houses: very narrow and deep, with a shop on the street. Every village had a dinh, a communal house for the village guardian spirit and for meetings.

• An Ede longhouse could be tens of metres long. When a family joined, the house was extended.
• It is often said that tube houses are so narrow because tax was charged on the width on the street.
• Dinh Bang near Hanoi from the 18th century is one of the best-known dinh, with strongly curled roof corners.

Ancient Vietnam: the Dong Son culture

The Dong Son culture flourished in northern Vietnam in the first millennium BC. It is famous for its large bronze drums. Those drums show stilt houses with a roof that rises at both ends like a boat or a saddle, often with birds on it.

• The Ngoc Lu drum is one of the finest and is in the museum in Hanoi.
• You can still see the saddle roof today among peoples in Southeast Asia, such as the Toraja on Sulawesi.
• The drums were played at festivals and buried in graves as treasures.

India: havelis and stepwells

A haveli is a large mansion of a wealthy family, best known from Rajasthan and Gujarat. The rooms lie around one or more courtyards. Projecting balconies with stone screens, the jharokhas, gave shade and let the women of the house watch the street without being seen. In the dry west people built stepwells: deep wells with stairs down to the groundwater, which rises and falls through the year.

• The havelis of Shekhawati are painted inside and out and are sometimes called the largest open-air gallery.
• Chand Baori in Abhaneri is more than a thousand years old and has about 3,500 steps on 13 levels in a zigzag pattern.
• Rani ki Vav in Patan from the 11th century has been on the World Heritage List since 2014 and is on the 100 rupee note.
• At the bottom of a stepwell it is much cooler than above, so it was also a place to cool off.

India: Mughal tombs

The Mughal emperors built large tombs in the middle of a four-part garden, the charbagh, as an image of paradise. Humayun's Tomb in Delhi (around 1570) is made of red sandstone with white marble. Emperor Shah Jahan had the Taj Mahal in Agra built for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, roughly from 1632 to 1653. The tomb of Itimad-ud-Daulah is also called the Baby Taj.

• The Taj Mahal has been on the World Heritage List since 1983, Humayun's Tomb since 1993.
• The four minarets of the Taj Mahal lean slightly outward. It is said this is so they would not fall onto the tomb in an earthquake.
• The dome of the Taj Mahal has an onion shape on a tall drum, with small pavilions (chhatris) around it.

Ancient India: Mohenjo-daro

Mohenjo-daro, in today's Pakistan, was one of the largest cities in the world around 2500 BC. The houses were made of fired bricks of standard sizes and lay around a courtyard. Many houses had their own well and a bathing place with a drain to a covered drain in the street.

• Hundreds of wells have been found in the city; the number 700 is often mentioned.
• The Great Bath is about 12 by 7 metres and 2.4 metres deep, with stairs on two sides and a layer of bitumen against leaks.
• On the street side the houses had hardly any windows. Light and air came from the courtyard.
• Mohenjo-daro has been on the World Heritage List since 1980.

Thailand: houses, ubosot, chedi and sala

A traditional Thai house (ruen thai) stands on tall stilts, dry at high water, and has a very steep roof that sheds the tropical rain quickly. The walls were loose panels, so you could move the house. In a temple complex (wat) the ubosot is the most sacred hall, where monks are ordained. Eight boundary stones (sema) around the hall mark the sacred ground. A chedi holds relics, and a sala is an open pavilion to rest in.

• The Jim Thompson House in Bangkok consists of six old teak houses that were rebuilt there.
• The graceful hook on the gable point is called a chofa and often represents a mythical bird.
• Sukhothai has chedis with a top like a lotus bud, Ayutthaya has large bell-shaped chedis.
• The tower of Wat Arun in Bangkok is a prang in Khmer style, covered with pieces of porcelain.