Liang Sicheng

Liang Sicheng the Chinese architect and architectural historian (1901-1972) who is regarded as the father of modern Chinese architectural scholarship. With his wife Lin Huiyin he surveyed and documented China's ancient timber buildings, founded the modern study of Chinese architectural history and helped to shape architectural education and conservation in twentieth-century China.

Family and Education

Liang Sicheng was born on 20 April 1901 in Tokyo, the son of the reformer and scholar Liang Qichao, one of the most influential thinkers of late imperial and early republican China. He grew up in an intensely cultivated household and received a broad education in Chinese literature and history before travelling to the United States to study architecture.

He enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied in the department of architecture and graduated with distinction in 1927. He went on to study at Harvard University, and during his years in the United States he was struck by the absence of any comparable body of scholarship on the history of Chinese building, a gap he resolved to fill on his return home.

In 1928 he married Lin Huiyin, his fellow student and lifelong collaborator, and the couple returned to China to take up academic and professional work. Their partnership would produce not only a family but one of the most productive research collaborations in the history of Chinese architecture.

Founding Architectural Education

In 1928 Liang Sicheng established the department of architecture at Northeastern University in Shenyang and served as its head, creating one of the earliest modern architectural programmes in China. He designed a curriculum that combined the teaching of modern construction and design with the study of Chinese building traditions, and he trained the first generation of professionally educated Chinese architects.

Illness forced him to leave Shenyang in 1931, and he joined the Society for the Study of Chinese Architecture, a scholarly body devoted to the systematic investigation of the country's historic buildings. Under its auspices he began the field surveys that would occupy him for the rest of the decade.

He also worked as a practising architect, designing buildings that sought to combine modern construction with elements drawn from Chinese tradition. His early buildings in Shenyang and Beijing were among the first attempts by a Chinese architect trained in the West to create a modern architecture appropriate to China.

The Field Surveys and Great Discoveries

Between 1932 and 1937 Liang and his colleagues travelled thousands of kilometres through north and central China, seeking out ancient temples, halls, pagodas and bridges, and recording them with measured drawings, photographs and written descriptions. Many of the buildings they studied were little known and had never been documented according to modern scholarly methods.

The work was physically arduous and often dangerous, carried out in remote country districts with poor roads and uncertain security. The team faced banditry, disease and the hostility of local officials, yet they persevered, and their published reports introduced Chinese readers and the international scholarly community to a lost world of early timber architecture.

Their greatest discovery came in 1937, when they identified the main hall of the Foguang Temple on Mount Wutai in Shanxi as a building of the Tang dynasty, dating to the ninth century. The finding was a landmark in Chinese architectural history, for it disproved the widely held view that no timber buildings from the Tang period survived, and it established the antiquity and sophistication of Chinese wooden construction.

War Years and Preservation Work

The war with Japan scattered the couple and their institution. Liang and Lin moved with their university to the south-west, living first in Changsha and then in Kunming and in a village in Sichuan, where they endured bombing, poverty and serious illness while continuing to teach and to write. Liang worked on his history of Chinese architecture during these years, often without access to libraries or to his earlier notes.

After the war he returned to Beijing and became a leading figure in the planning of the capital and in the conservation of its historic buildings. He taught at Tsinghua University, where he founded a school of architecture, and he took part in the design of monuments and public buildings for the new state, including contributions to the national emblem and to the monument to the people's heroes.

He campaigned for the preservation of Beijing's ancient city, arguing that the old walls, gates and traditional districts should be protected and adapted rather than demolished. His proposals for the protection of the historic fabric of the capital were only partly adopted, and the demolition of much of the old city in the following decade became a source of lasting regret.

Writings, Later Life and Legacy

Liang's scholarly legacy rests on his great history of Chinese architecture and on the drawings and photographs he produced during his surveys. His work, much of it completed in conditions of great difficulty and published after his death, remains the standard reference for the study of Chinese building and the foundation of the discipline in China.

In his later years he was criticised during the political campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s for his views on architecture and planning, and his health and reputation suffered. He died in Beijing on 9 January 1972, before the full rehabilitation of his work and the recognition of the value of the conservation principles he had advocated.

He is honoured as the father of modern Chinese architectural scholarship and as a pioneer of architectural conservation. The institutions he founded, the scholars he trained and the buildings he documented bear witness to a career that gave China a scientific understanding of its own architectural heritage and connected it to the wider history of world architecture.

See also

• Lin Huiyin
• Foguang Temple
• Chinese architecture
• Society for the Study of Chinese Architecture