CRAFT and RITUAL in TRADITIONAL CHINESE CARPENTRY with a Bibliographical Note on the Lu Ban Jing

Chinese Science, 1986, 7: 1- 23

CRAFT AND RITUAL IN TRADITIONAL CHINESE CARPENTRY With a Bibliographical Note on the Lu Ban Jing

Klaas RUITENBEEK

Traditional Chinese literature on woodworking and building is extensive. Some of the best known examples include the Yingzao fashi I ii_ ~ti\ (Treatise on building methods, 1103), the Ziren yizhi •• A..lf. t. (Traditions of the joiner's craft, 1264), the Dongguan jishi )}. j •e. f (Report of the Winter-official, 1618), and the Gongbu gongcheng zuofa .%.j~.l. ¥1 tF ~ (Construction methods of the Board of Works, 1734).1 These works describe mainly the building of palaces, and are written from the viewpoint of the architects and officials who had to supervise large projects. There exist, however, a small number of popular technical treatises. The carpenter's manual Lu Ban jing-t-~H: (Canon of Lu Ban, second quarter of the fifteenth century) is the most important work of this category.2 The Lu Ban jing is written from the viewpoint of the ordinary carpenter, and deals with the construction of ordinary houses. The construction of a house implied much more than a series of technical oper ations. Correspondingly, the finished house was more than just a shelter from rain and wind; it also influenced the luck of the people who lived in it.

Dr. Klaas Ruitenheek worked at the Sinologisch lnstituut, Leiden, from 1980 to 1985. He is now Assistant Curator at the Department of Asiatic Art, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. He is finishing a dissertation on the Lu Ban jing.

1Chinese literature on building and woodworking is cited in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, IV. 3 (Cambridge, 1971), 80-89 and Wang Shixiang 1ti!l•"U7l 11; ~ I! 1l l'J 'Iii" Wenwu cankao ziliao :i.:f!Pf.f )t..t!f- , 1963, 7: 19-25. On Ying.zao fashi see Paul Demieville, "Che-yin Song Li Ming-tchong Ymg tsao fa che ('Edition photolithographique de la Methode d'architecture de Li Ming-tchong des Song') 1920, 8 fascicules," Bulletin de /'Ecole Francaise de !'Extreme-Orient, 1925, 25: 213-264 (reprinted in Demieville, Choix d'etudes sinologiques (1921-1970) [Leiden, 1973), pp. 575-626), Else Glahn, "On the Transmission of the Ying-tsao fa-shih,"Toung Pao, 19'75, 61: 232-265, and Chen Mingdaft lift ;t, Ying.zao fashi damuzuo yanjiu Iii.~ i( 1'* il lit* (Beijing, 1981); on Ziren yizhi, Dieter Kuhn, Die Webstiihle des Tzu-jen i-chih aus der Yiian-Zeit (Wiesbaden, 1977); on Dongguan jish~ Yang Lien-sheng, "Economic Aspects of Public Works in Imperial China," pp. 191-248 in Yang, Excursions in Sinology (Cambridge, MA, 1969), esp. pp. 227-228; and on Gongbu gongcheng zuofa, Wang Puzi.!. J~~, "7l :J.jp~ ....)<.xf{f«;f.>," Gugong bowuyuan yuankan•I tfftJlf. ftf'.J. 1983, 1: 49-55. 2 Popular manuals, including those used by carpenters in Taiwan and discussed below, are not ordinarily printed. A printed hut heavily edited version is Yao Chengzu~ ,ft *8 et aL, Ying.zao fayuanf ;l$L )~(Beijing, 1959). Yao, former head of the carpenter's guild of Suzhou, com piled this work in the 1920's. The history of the Lu Ban jing text is discussed in Appendix A below. Of the many articles on Lu Ban, the patron diety of carpenters, published in the P. R C., the best is Xu Yuif Jl, "~filt1cf'•~l5iil~~~-1Ut-i-litf.f.-ft ,"Ill, 193-207 in Zheng ShuorenlJil! A. & Tu Shi~ h, Zhongguo minjian wenxue lunwen xuan lflil~(l)st_ ~ • i. ;1 (3 vois., Shanghai, 1980), originally published in Minjian wenxue M. !'iJ !l ~ , 1963, 2:26-37. On Lu Ban anecdotes see Ruitenheek, Bouwbedrijf en bouwmagie in het tradt. tionele China (Leiden, 1984). 2

The building workers, head d by the carpenters, were not the only persons involved in the building of a house. There was also the geomancer, who selected the site for the house, and in doing so, could influence the fate of its occupants. Thirdly, there was the house-owner, who had to pay for everything, and had to beware of cheating and magic on the part of the carpenter and the geomancer. This suspicion was as mutual as that between the owner, contractor, and building inspector in contemporary society. A common body of information arose which allowed each party to keep check on the others. All three had their own written guides to which they could resort. For the geomancer there was an abundance of works on siting. For the carpenter there were the Lu Ban jing and some other manuals. For the house owner there were the sections on building in various popular encyclopedias, where countermeasures against the sorcery of carpenters were described explicitly. Not surprisingly, large sections of books in these categories are identical. This common body of information is also incorporated into the popular almanac, tongshu ~ :f', which was consulted by all three parties. 3 The almanac, the main reference work of those who could not read or read but poorly ,4 was probably the most widely diffused book of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. The almanac gives auspicious and inauspicious days for about seventy five different categories of human action, selected because they were felt to be of special importance. If we arrange these seventy-five categories for which divi nation was practiced into larger groups we see that, just to mention the more important groups, five belong to the field of religion, five to marriage, six to burial, five to the body and health, eight to finance and commerce, ten to agri culture, and seventeen to construction work, of which ten concern the building of houses.5 From this simple statistic the importance of house building is obvious.

3Works on geomancy are studied in Stephan D. R. Feuchtwang, An Anthropological Analysis of Chinese Geomancy (Vientiane, 1974) and Steven J. Bennett, "Patterns of the Sky and Earth: A Chinese Science of Applied Cosmology," Chinese Science, 1978, 3: 1-26. On popular encyclo pedias see Sakai Tadao if!# ~· 1- , "•" i{ O> 8 ffJG .f "'Ji iii.fl i ," pp. 25-155 in Hayashi Tomoharu # &j., Kinsei Chugoku kyoikushi kenkyu \.6. tit if'liil.ft" ~lif'l;t (Tokyo, 1958); and on the popular almanac, Carole Morgan, Le tableau du boeuf du prinlemps. Etude d'une page de l'almanach chinois (Memoires de 11nstitut des Hautes Etudes Chinoi.Bes de l'Universite de Paris, 14; Paris, 1980), and Fei Hsiao-t'ung, Peasant Life in China (London, 1939), pp 150- 151. Cf. the work on French almanacs of Genevieve Boll~me, Les almanachs populaires aux XVIf? et XVIIfl si~cles. Essai d'histoire sociale (Paris, 1969). Many of this author's general remarks are also applicable to China. 4The use of red for auspicious and black for inauspicious dates and the profuse illustrations made almanacs accessible to the illiterate. Fei, ibid., p. 151, notes that "they usually distinguish 'good day' and 'bad day' according to the length of the column of 'good for.'" 5Counting three months of the almanac Xianggang mingii§ ;I. 'RtZ.for 1980-1981 (Hong Kong, 1980). Auspicious and inauspicious days for various activities are noted in calendars of the T'ang; Fujieda Akirai 4l l· "fi~.f all.'' Toho gokuho. ~ .§fl.(Kyoto), 1973, 45: 377-441, illustrations pp. 387, 393, 396, and'404. On Five Dynasties calendars see Morgan, ibid., p. 23. Categories for divination varied from dynasty to dynasty. A list for the Qing period. may be found in the imperially sponsored divination manual (Qinding) Xieji bianfang shu~~ tlo!e.J4.zl(l 742), 11, "Yong shi ~ f."