"Unprecedented coverage" --China Quarterly, 2002

"Fascinating and comprehensive ... a valuable recording of a landscape that is rapidly disappearing." --Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, 2001 (Download full review)

"Valuable ... and eminently readable" --Asian Folklore Studies LX (2001)

"With this volume, ... Knapp has added an excellent capstone to his prodigious array of scholarly work" --Urban Morphology 7 (2003)

China's Old Dwellings is the most comprehensive critical examination of China's folk architectural forms in any language. It and its companion volume, China's Living Houses: Folk Beliefs, Symbols, and Household Ornamentation (UH Press, 1999), together form a landmark study of the environmental, historical, and social factors that influence housing forms for nearly a quarter of the world's population. Both books draw on the author's thirty years of fieldwork and extensive travel in China as well as published and unpublished material in many languages.

China's Old Dwellings begins by tracing the interest in Chinese vernacular buildings in the twentieth century. Early chapters detail common and distinctive spatial components, including the interior and exterior modular spaces that are axiomatic components of most Chinese dwellings as well as conventional structural components and building materials common in Chinese construction. Later chapters examine representative housing types in the three broad cultural realms--northern, southern, and western--into which China has been divided. Knapp completes his survey with an exploration of China's old dwellings in the context of the rapid economic and social changes that are destroying so many of them.

Ronald G. Knapp is SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geography at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is the author of China's Living Houses: Folk Beliefs, Symbols, and Household Ornamentation (UH Press, 1999) and China's Vernacular Architecture: House Form and Culture (UH Press, 1989), and the editor of Chinese Landscapes: The Village as Place (UH Press, 1992).