Featuring over 350 beautiful photographs, Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia captures the architectural heritage of a vibrant community. The multiple Chinese migrations from southeastern China to Southeast Asia have had important implications for both regions. In Southeast Asia this influence can be seen in the architecturally eclectic homes these migrants and their descendants built as they became successful; homes that combined Chinese, European and local influences, especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia strives not only to be an informative but also an authoritative book on the subject of hybrid architecture--filled with stunning color photographs and essays on nearly thirty well-preserved homes. An introductory essay portrays the historical circumstances that gave rise to Chinese houses overseas, and includes historic images, color photographs, paintings and line drawings. At the core of the book is a comprehensive set of stunning color photographs of nearly thirty well-preserved homes built by Chinese immigrants and their descendants in various countries of Southeast Asia. Images and drawings from southeastern China help clarify similarities and differences. For each home, extensive captions accompany the photographs and the essay supplies background information concerning the individual and family who built and resided in each house. The historical context, nature of the building, and the restoration history of the home is included. Extensive information about the symbolism implicit in the decorative elements that make up each of the homes is presented. This includes an examination of ornamental elements that are Chinese in origin as well as those decorative components that are Western. Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia has been written in a nontechnical style, accessible to lay readers who are interested in the extraordinary architectural heritage of China, much of which is only now beginning to be appreciated.

Winner of ForeWord Magazine's Architecture "Book of the Year" Award! Exquisite examples of traditional dwellings are scattered throughout modern-day China. Chinese Houses focuses on 20 well-preserved traditional Chinese homes, presenting examples from a range of rural and metropolitan areas throughout China. The photographs of each are accompanied by extensive background information and historical content. An introductory essay examines the different types of Chinese homes and provides an overview of the rich regional variety of Chinese dwelling forms. It also provides insights into little-known design concepts that emphasize the flexibility, adaptability, and versatility of traditional building forms and the work of traditional craftsmen. Richly illustrated with photographs, woodblock prints, historic images, and line drawings, Chinese Houses portrays an architectural tradition of amazing range and resilience.

Discover the rarified Peranakan (native-born Chinese of Southeast Asia) aesthetics that are today highly sought-after for their beauty: distinctive furniture and ceramics, textiles and jewelry, and many other art objects. Peranakan Chinese Home displays these extraordinary objects, visible markers of a highly developed culture. The broad range of beautiful objects which the Peranakan Chinese created and enjoyed in their daily lives is astounding. Each chapter in The Peranakan Chinese Home focuses on a different area and presents objects used or found in those spaces. Each piece is described in the context of their utility as household objects, as part of periodic celebrations to mark the Chinese New Year and other holidays, or in important life passage rituals relating to ancestor worship, birth, marriage, mourning and burial. The meaning of the rich symbolic and ornamental motifs found on the objects is discussed in detail and key differences are highlighted between Peranakan objects and similar ones found in China. A fascinating mix of Chinese, European and Southeast Asian influences, the distinctly Peranakan identity of a people and their culture is beautifully portrayed through objects and archival photographs in this lovely and exotic book.

"Step inside for a look at the fascinating houses of the Chinese. Stand outside, and you'll take in exteriors made with everything from stone to sand to animal hides. Whether they stand in bustling Beijing or on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, a look at the traditional residences of China will transport you to a different world and provide you with a firsthand view of Chinese life. Written by noted Chinese architects and writers, this comprehensive architectural tour presents a window into the history of Chinese culture." "In Chinese Houses hundreds of full-color photographs share space along with the diagrams and floor plans. As a whole this meticulously constructed book will open doors of understanding for anyone interested in learning more about Chinese culture."--Jacket.

With hundreds of photographs and a wealth of information, Yin Yu Tang tells the history of a traditional Chinese house and the fascinating stories of its occupants. In the late Qing dynasty, around the year 1800, a prosperous Chinese merchant named Huang built a house for his family in a remote village southwest of Shanghai. He called the home Yin Yu Tang which means Hall of Abundant Shelter—implying his desire for the building to shelter many of his descendants. For seven generations, members of the Huang family ate, slept, laughed, cried, married and gave birth in the house. By the mid-1990s, the surviving members of the Huang family had moved away from Yin Yu Tang to take jobs in the cities. In 2003 the house found a new home as a permanent exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. This book, with its room-by-room, generation-by-generation documentation of life in the house, serves as a unique and invaluable introduction to traditional Chinese family and village life. Nancy Berliner, one of the country's foremost experts on Chinese furniture and arts, takes the reader on a tour of this unique homestead providing detail on Chinese architecture, construction methods, decoration, furniture and family heirlooms. She weaves a story of domestic life in Chinese culture by explaining the traditions of the family who lived here—especially their love and respect for family and ancestors. She also documents the remarkable restoration and reconstruction of Yin Yu Tang, truly a treasure trove of Chinese history. With hundreds of photographs, scores of primary documents, and thousands of fascinating details, Yin Yu Tang: The Architecture and Daily Life of a Chinese House offers a vivid portrait of everyday life in traditional China.

The Straits Chinese or Peranakan community is perhaps one of the oldest overseas Chinese communities in history, having established itself in the Malay archipelago as early as the seventeenth century.

Health and happiness are fundamental to human quality of life. The United Nations World Happiness Report 2012 reflects a new worldwide call for governments to include happiness as a criterion to their policies. The Healthy Cities or Happy Cities movement has been endorsed by the WHO since 1986, and a Healthy House or Happy Home is a critical constituent of a healthy city or a happy city. Nevertheless, the concept has not been fully explored. Existing literature on the healthy house has often focused on the technical, economic, environmental, or biochemical aspects, while current scholarship on the happy home commonly centers on interior decoration. Few studies have addressed the importance of social and cultural factors that affect the health and happiness of the occupants. Identifying four key themes in Chinese philosophy to promote health and happiness at home, this book links architecture with Chinese philosophy, social sciences, and the humanities, and in doing so, argues that Architectural Multiculturalism is a vital ideology to guide housing design in North America. Using both qualitative and quantitative evidence gathered from ethnic Chinese and non-Chinese living in the USA and Canada, the study proposes that the Courtyard is a central component to promote social and cultural health and happiness of residents. It further details courtyard garden house design strategies that combine a sense of privacy with a feeling of community as represented in courtyard housing. The schemes may have universal implications.

A common thread throughout the essays in this volume is a focus on new loci of power that emerge either in collision with colonial power structures, or in collaboration with or those that emerge in the wake of decolonization. While the authors recognize the presence of a larger structure of colonial hegemony, they also investigate those centers of power that emerge in the interstices of crevices of colonial power. Interdisciplinary and theoretically innovative, this book offers a global perspective on colonial and national landscapes, rewrites the master creator narrative, examines national landscapes as sites of contestation and views the globalization of processes such as archaeology beyond the boundaries of the national.

Mapping Chinese Rangoon is both an intimate exploration of the Sino-Burmese, people of Chinese descent who identify with and choose to remain in Burma/Myanmar, and an illumination of twenty-first-century Burma during its emergence from decades of military-imposed isolation. This spatial ethnography examines how the Sino-Burmese have lived in between states, cognizant of the insecurity in their unclear political status but aware of the social and economic possibilities in this gray zone between two oppressive regimes. For the Sino-Burmese in Rangoon, the labels of Chinese and Tayout (the Burmese equivalent of Chinese) fail to recognize the linguistic and cultural differences between the separate groups that have settled in the city—Hokkien, Cantonese, and Hakka—and conflate this diverse population with the state actions of the People’s Republic of China and the supposed dominance of the overseas Chinese network. In this first English-language study of the Sino-Burmese, Mapping Chinese Rangoon examines the concepts of ethnicity, territory, and nation in an area where ethnicity is inextricably tied to state violence.

The magnificent wonders of China, ancient and modern, revealed by an international team of leading scholars. China is the oldest continuous civilization on earth and holds a unique global place in the twenty-first century. The Great Wonders of China’s wide focus shows what makes China such a special country, with topics stretching from the natural wonders, including mountains and rivers, to the Silk Road; the technological innovations of printing and the compass; and the modern, vibrant cities of today as well as famous monuments, such as the Forbidden City in Beijing and the Great Wall. In this new and updated paperback edition, a team of leading scholars from Asia and the West provide a compelling history of China. Beyond the quality of the individual entries, The Great Wonders of China provides a chronicle of Chinese history and culture as well as helping readers understand and appreciate this vast country.