"Liao Architecture is doubly important because it makes a major contribution to the scholarship on the Liao and makes it available in English." --China Review International, Spring 1999

Liao Architecture is a study of Buddhist halls, tombs, and pagodas built primarily through the patronage of Northeast Asian lords of Qidan nationality from the mid-tenth through the first decades of the twelfth century. During those years, North China was part of a larger Qidan empire known as the Liao dynasty. The Qidan, in the ninth century, were seminomadic tribe living along China's northern and northeastern borders. Less than fifty years later, by the early years of the tenth century, they and other North Asia groups were confederated under the leadership of a Qidan chieftain named Abaoji. In 947 Abaoji's son established a Chinese-style dynasty named Liao. Liao territory stretched from the Gobi Desert, across Mongolia, into China's Northeast provinces (former Manchuria), and into Korea. It also included sixteen prefectures of North China.

There is little evidence of wooden or brick architecture in Qidan territory prior to contact with sedentary peoples. Yet immediately upon contact, even before the formation of their dynasty, the Qidan built walled cities, Buddhist monasteries, and multichambered tombs with a variety of floor plans. In this first study of Liao architecture, Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt argues that architecture played a fundamental role in empire formation for the Liao. According to Steinhardt, in spite of the lack of a native tradition of permanent structures, Liao architecture rivaled and even surpassed earlier or contemporary Chinese buildings in wood or brick. Through unique manipulations of the timber building frame, recasting of traditional Chinese building parts in original, more complex, and more creative formations, and, most important, conscientious employment of religious and funerary space for symbolic purposes, the greatest architectural achievement in the tenth- and eleventh-century East Asia occurred on Liao soil, not in Northern Song (960-1126) China.

Drawing on an impressive range of traditional Chinese records, research by East Asian and European scholars, and recent archaeological work at Liao sites, Steinhardt demonstrates that a group of hunters living on the fringe of Chinese civilization adopted and adapted architecture of the people they conquered to enhance their legitimate role as Asian monarchs. Liao buildings provide case studies in the borrowing, transfer, adoption, adaptation, absorption, and transmission of art, architecture, and their symbolism. Using architecture as a key medium, Steinhardt explains, a seminomadic society was transformed into a more sedentary one.

In the course of the book, the structures of the fourteen extant Liao wooden buildings and selected tombs and pagodas are analyzed. Especially important are bracket-set formations, the placement of images, ceiling design, and the positioning of buildings in Buddhist monasteries. Through these details, Steinhardt postulates the employment of god-king imagery in individual halls and the combination of buildings and their decoration into three-dimensional mandalas. She also explores the influence of Tang (618-906) Chinese architecture on Liao buildings and concludes that Tang is just one among the earlier cultures whose building patterns gave way to Liao forms. Architecture of the Korean peninsula, she suggests, was at least as influential. Steinhardt persuades the reader to understand Liao as a North Asian dynasty rather than as a mere offshoot of Tang China, and further, to see later Northeast Asian construction as inheriting, preserving, and occasionally restoring Liao architectural innovations.

This highly interpretive study will serve as a standard reference on a pivotal but heretofore ignored period of Chinese and East Asian art and cultural history.

Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt is professor of East Asian art at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of Chinese Imperial City Planning (UH Press, 1999).