China: The Clash of Ancient and Modern

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It also suggests an important strategy for mediating the compatibility of large and small, surely one of the most vexing issues for the postmodern environment.

Visiting the Forbidden City, I was struck both by its fabulous refinement and enormity and by the way it defines its differences between public and domestic spaces. The emperor’s sleeping quarters within the Inner Court, in particular, seemed surprisingly miniscule, scaled to the intimacy of village life, small rooms around a little courtyard in dramatic contrast to the gigantic spaces of official encounter nearby. Here, the intrigues were also personal and it was easy to imagine the habitual weirdness of the eunuch standing outside the royal bedroom timing the emperor’s congress with his concubines with a burning stick of incense. Talk about performance pressure!

The Chinese have a longstanding genius for domestic architecture, and a visit to the hutong of Beijing—the fast-disappearing neighborhoods of courtyard houses, laced with small lanes and commerce, sanctuaries of both intimacy and variety in the midst of a city too rapidly doing away with the best of its public character—affirms the singularity and brilliance of their historic accomplishment. Such places offer an alternative vision to the Modernist constructs that shape the city today and provide an irreplaceable element in the urban repertoire that demands not simply to be conserved but extended.

If the hutong of Beijing represent a kind of pure Chinese urban expression (though one with affinities with other courtyard aggregations in Asia and elsewhere), the longtang (or lilong) of Shanghai (and the similar lifen of Wuhan, which I have recently been studying with my students) represent a composite architecture that is the successful outgrowth of a previous encounter with imported models. These neighborhoods developed in the wake of the Opium War, when Shanghai was forcibly opened to foreign settlement as a treaty port (Wuhan, on the Yangtze River, was another). In 1845, the local government promulgated its Settlement Law, defining both the site and the legal character of these foreign enclaves. Among the stipulations of the law was that foreigners could not lease houses to Chinese, who were forbidden to live in the settlement areas.

Fewer than 10 years later, a rebellion broke out in the city and large numbers of Chinese began to seek safety within the foreign concessions, leading the occupying powers to unilaterally revise the land law by discarding its no-Chinese stipulation. The result was a massive real estate boom that led many of the corporations (including the legendary Sassoon, Jardine Matheson, and Gibb Livingston) that had previously profited from the trade in opium and other commodities to shift focus to real estate, both by letting existing properties and by building new ones at the periphery of their immediate spheres of influence.

The architecture of these new neighborhoods quickly developed into the longtang type, a two-story row house located along a straight and narrow lane. Initially, these houses kept the layout of traditional courtyard compounds, compressed and deformed to accommodate the party-wall condition, regular geometry, and small site constraints of their urban situation. They nevertheless retained a small entry court and a sense of sequence from the public street through a private gate into a sequestered interior realm, as well as traditional forms of construction, materiality, and style. Hybrids.

As the type developed further, it was incrementally transformed. The little courtyards gave way to parlors or to unenclosed or semi-enclosed gardens. Layouts were adjusted to suit smaller, nonextended families. Rooms were organized according to more “modern” notions of function. Houses grew to three stories or were configured as flats. And the developments began to accrete decorative and morphological aspects of Western architecture.