The construction manual Yingzao fashi (Building standards) was compiled by Li Jie, an imperial official in the Directorate of Construction. Published in 1103, it is one of the most significant documents in Chinese architectural history. Since the rediscovery of the book in 1919, Chinese architectural historians have used it as a key to the world of ancient master carpenters. Besides seeking to understand its technical terms and methods, and besides reconstructing its line drawings by means of material evidence from extensive field investigations, architectural historians have made substantial progress in determining how the Yingzao fashi functioned as a set of technical standards in the construction of buildings during the Song dynasty. The main questions they have attempted to answer include how the measurements of the eight different grades of the cai module, stipulated in the manual, were determined and by which rationale; how the module principle was applied to architectural design in the Song, Liao, and Jin dynasties; and what the differences were between the two basic types of structures mentioned in the manual, the tingtang and the diantang. During the past three decades, interest in Chinese architectural history has also increased in the West, especially in the English-speaking world. Most of the resulting studies have focused on extant buildings and on the historiography of Chinese architecture, and this has made reference to the Yingzao fashi indispensable. Extensive discussion of the ancient manual itself, however, has been rare in Western scholarship.

Jiren Feng's Chinese Architecture and Metaphor: Song Culture in the Yingzao Fashi Building Manual is arguably the first monograph in English that contributes to the study of the literary value of the Song manual. Not only has the author taken the bull by the horns and provided translations of some key phrases, paragraphs, and even entire sections from the book, he also offers interpretations of the semantics of important architectural terms in the manual, especially of terms associated with that unique element of Chinese architecture, dougong bracketing.

Most historians of Chinese architecture believe that the architectural terminology in ancient manuals came from the colloquial language of craftsmen, and that the terminology is therefore random, and hardly conducive to scientific or even logical interpretation. Feng, however, interprets the terminology as “strong evidence of cultural encounter” (p. 9) and demonstrates the semantic coherence of the architectural terms in the manual. For example, Feng analyzes the botanic metaphors used in the names of some bracketing elements, which refer to the properties of branches, flowers, and petals (chapter 4). He also proposes connections between architectural writing and contemporary literature, arguing that the names of the bracket arms called linggong and mangong may be associated with the terms lingci (short melody) and manci (longer melody) in poetry (chapter 5). Using evidence from the Song as well as later dynasties, Feng thus makes a strong argument for an interaction between scholars and craftsmen that produced a shared architectural knowledge and vocabulary in premodern China: “scholars and craftsmen were two interactive forces in the domain of building knowledge. . . . The communication and cooperation between these two social forces uniquely yet significantly contributed to practical and theoretical architectural knowledge, an essential aspect of Chinese civilization” (p. 212).

Before introducing Li Jie and the background of the compilation of the Yingzao fashi in chapter 3, Jiren Feng offers in chapters 1 and 2 a systematic survey of the history of Chinese architectural writing, from the pre-Qin period to the Northern Song dynasty. In this survey, he discusses ancient classics (such as the Liji, Zhouli, Shangshu, and Erya), Tang-dynasty imperial building regulations, the illustrated ritual handbook Sanli tu, the Song-dynasty geomantic compendium Dili xinshu, and the technological treatise Mujing (Timberwork manual). By demonstrating that Chinese architecture as a knowledge system has been enduringly associated with Chinese ritual, political administration, literature, and even painting traditions, Feng's book supplies an invaluable complement to the study of Chinese construction history, whose approach is currently dominated by a technical orientation. It provides a solid foundation not only for further study of the Yingzao fashi, but also for more general interdisciplinary research on the built environment in China.

Metaphor, of course, cannot have been the dominant consideration for a compiler of official building standards, nor was metaphor the only method Li Jie used for choosing the names of structural elements. For instance, the designation pupaifang (a kind of tie beam) may be a transcription of a southern dialect word for “flat-board,” which was transcribed as pingbanfang during the Qing dynasty. This example suggests that some of the vocabulary in the Yingzao fashi derives from regional craftsman traditions. But Jiren Feng's book does remind us that metaphor is part of a system of meaning in Chinese architecture that extends beyond technical concerns and that deserves further examination in the study of the Chinese built environment. In addition to metaphor, this system also includes names, allusions, and symbolism. As the scholar-official Jia Zheng says, in the Qing-dynasty novel A Dream of Red Mansions, upon seeing the newly finished family garden: “If we leave the chief sights and pavilions without a single name or couplet…, the garden, however lovely with its flowers and willows, rocks and streams, cannot fully reveal its charm” (Tsao Hsueh-chin and Kao Ngo, A Dream of Red Mansions, trans. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang [Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1978], vol. 1, p. 226).