Chinese Dwellings

Residential house architecture in China can be divided into three basic construction styles: Courtyard, Carved (or clay), and Storied.

Courtyard Dwellings
The courtyard home is the most popular dwelling styles in China. Courtyards call quadrangles (“four-sided enclosed courtyards) use the most advanced material and structure design and have the most complicated arrangements of traditional ethic code and diversified decorations. The fundamental character of the courtyard house is: being enclosed, symmetrical in middle axis and clear distinction between primary and secondary, outside and inside. A courtyard style home usually has one entrance, a gate built at the southeastern corner. The layout maximized space and provided privacy. In the center of the court was an ideal place for a garden and/or flowers. Courtyard style homes are mainly seen in North China, the Central Plains, the Shandong Peninsula, and the plains and coastal areas in South China. The courtyard home is popular in the ethnic minority areas with close ties to the Han culture such as the Bai and Nahsi. Laws have been created in Beijing to protect its 25 lanes and courtyard homes in its ancient areas. The earliest courtyard houses were built in the Qin and Han dynasties. The popularity of this style of house was due to the technological of Qin bricks and Han tiles.

Cave Dwellings
Cave-style dwellings are the most primitive among all architectural styles of residential homes. Over 30 million people live in cave dwellings in the upper and middles areas of the Yangtze River. The most common style of cave homes can be found in the middle and west regions of China including Henan, Shanxi, and Gansu. Underground cave homes in west of Henan and plains of Southern Shanxi are wholly built underground. Caves are dug with earth steps as entrance and are inhabited by several households. Another type of cave home widely adopted in mountainous regions is carved along a mountain contour line with connecting caves dug on natural hillsides and a courtyard built outside the cave. Cave on the Losess Plateau in northwest China average 20 feet deep and 15 feet wide. From a distance, the caves appear as multiple floors, one atop the other.

Storied Dwellings
Storied buildings have two or more floors with a horizontal main ridge. Storied building in China date back to the Warring States (475-221 B.C.) and are mainly common in the mountains of minority nationalities in the southwest semi-tropical areas. The traditional typical wood Ganlan buildings are all made of wood including its framework, plank walls, and bark tile. They are built with wood joints and without any iron nails. The plane of the house is rectangle, while the roof has a double-slope shape, with the first two to three levels having no walls. The households live closely along the hillside. In the southwest of Yunnan and De Hong in the west of Yunnan, there are bamboo Ganlan buildings with a bamboo wood combined structure using large amount of mao bamboos. Unlike the wood structures, the building materials of bamboo dwellings are connected mostly by coil rope and rattan.