![]() ![]() Each of these conferences as well as intervening field work provided opportunities for the authors to discover new bridges worth assessing across seven areas of China (Map). In 2019, the conference returned to Qingyuan, Zhejiang. In 2017, the conference moved beyond Fujian and Zhejiang to Zhuoshui, Qianjiang District, Chongqing Municipality. However, as successive conferences were held-Shouning, Fujian in 2007 Pingnan, Fujian in 2009 Qingyuan, Zhejiang in 2011 and jointly in Zhenghe, Fujian and Taishun, Zhejiang in 2013-it became quite clear that there was a broader area of shared building history than that of a single mountainous county (Fig. The inaugural conference in 2005, which Knapp attended, was held in Zhejiang’s Taishun County at that time considered the major site for timber bridges. Driven by a succession of conferences organised by Liu Jie of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in the first decade of the 21st century, a score of academics and amateurs began to build an interest in the subject. In time, however, it became clear that bridges-especially those with a timber roof and siding-were more than traditional buildings that embodied the work of carpenters and masons, but also could be seen as significant components of China’s broader traditional economic and social life. Footnote 1 Early on, as was the common practice of academics writing about China’s rural landscapes then, bridges, like old houses, pagodas, ancestral halls, gravesites, and temples were generally viewed as merely surviving remnants from the past of once complete villages. Knapp’s research in the countryside, which began in 1965 in Taiwan and then expanded to the China mainland from 1977 onward, focused on documenting old rural dwellings and broader aspects of vernacular architecture in villages. Despite the scope of this book, the complexity of China’s langqiao remains understudied.ĭiscovery of the significance of the architectural typology known in China as ‘corridor bridge’ has emerged slowly. The research presented in this article draws heavily from the authors’ China’s Covered Bridges: Architecture over Water, a comprehensive book published in late 2019 in Shanghai and London by Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press that will be distributed in 2020 by the University of Hawai’i Press. Rather than being abandoned as artifacts from the past, China’s langqiao today represent a living tradition that continues serving rural communities as places of passage, spaces for leisure and marketing, sites for worship, and increasingly destinations for tourists in search of nostalgic connections with China’s past. Just as with these better researched structures, langqiao must be studied not only from the perspective of architecture, but also anthropology, geography, history, and sociology, among other disciplines. Even older langqiao with parallel log beams as the substructure have come to light in neighboring Fujian province, most notably the Zhiqing Bridge in a rural area of Jian’ou city that dates to 1490.Ĭhina’s bridges, whether with a corridor atop or without, have traditionally not been included under the umbrella of ‘vernacular architecture’ even as they usually were created by local craftspeople employing the same approaches and practices for dwellings and temples. ![]() The Rulong Bridge, which dates to 1625 and is documented as the oldest standing woven arch-beam langqiao, can be visited today in Qingyuan county, southern Zhejiang. ![]() Throughout south and central China today there is moreover a resurgence of new timber langqiao being erected using traditional carpentry alongside the unprecedented construction of modern marvels of steel and concrete.Īrchaeological evidence in 2001 uncovered China’s earliest ‘corridor bridge’-thus the oldest known covered bridge in the world-with a length of 42 m dating to the Han dynasty 2000 years ago. Rivaling or exceeding those in the West in number, age, complexity, and architectural ambition, some of China’s outstanding timber langqiao in the mountains of Fujian and Zhejiang provinces are on the cusp of being inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage cultural sites. Essentially unknown in the rest of the world and only recently appreciated in China, the globally significant 3000+ ‘corridor bridges’ ( langqiao) in China far outnumber the better-known ‘covered bridges’ found in North America and Europe. ![]()
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