Review

Reviewed Work(s): Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts by Jeffrey W. Cody,

Nancy S. Steinhardt and Tony Atkin
Review by: Shuishan Yu
Source: China Review International , 2010, Vol. 17, No. 3 (2010), pp. 324-328
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press

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 324 China Review International: Vol. 17, No. 3, 2010

subtle reinterpretation of the term da, we await Cheung's second volume. This
word (like so many others to be found in the vocabulary of Chinese translation
criticism) has meaning far beyond its immediate application to the use of lan
guage. It is a key word in the conception of the Confucian true gentleman, or the
Taoist man of virtue. To complete the circle, the best translator—the one who can
really penetrate to the heart of a text and return with its true reincarnation in
another language—is, ultimately, a gentleman or gentlewoman, and a man/
woman of virtue. Sincerity, insight, and an open heart and mind are the
requirements.
Although the texts selected by Cheung and her team can be found in multiple
Chinese-language anthologies, I myself regret that this otherwise beautifully
produced and excellently edited, designed, and indexed volume does not give us
the Chinese originals. This case would have been perfect for the parallel-text
format. If that inclusion was considered too off-putting for the general reader, the
texts could have been printed as an appendix. Perhaps in another edition?

John Minford

John Minford is a translator of Chinese literature. He is currently a professor of

Chinese at the Australian National University.

讓围
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鐳画
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Jeffrey W. Cody, Nancy S. Steinhardt, and Tony Atkin, editors. Chinese

Architecture and the Beaux-Arts. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press

Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011. xxi, 385 pp. Hardcover
$52.00, isbn 978-0-8248-3456-2.

The marriage between traditional Chinese architecture and the Beaux-Arts

design tradition is one of the most significant events in the architectural field in
twentieth-century China. The matchmakers, some fifty Chinese students studying
architecture abroad during the early Republican period (1912-1949), most of them
in the United States with a handful in Europe and Japan, are known as the first
generation of Chinese architects. Born during the last two decades of the Qing
dynasty (1644-1911) and professionally trained overseas in their early adulthoods,
© 2012 by University this generation had received both classical Chinese and Western educations and,
ofHawai'i Press thus, was a perfect candidate for the historical role it played. The impact these
architects made on the constructed environment of modern China is profound
and far-reaching—from the changes in architectural styles and design processes to

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 Reviews 325

the development of architectural education and a new identity for the architect.
The impact can still be felt in the dawn of the twenty-first century.
This book, Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Artsy edited by Jeffrey Cody,
Nancy Steinhardt, and Tony Atkin, is the first and most comprehensive book
dedicated solely to this fusion of traditions in modern Chinese architecture. The
sixteen contributors, including the three editors, include many leading scholars in
the field and represent a diversity of academic and professional backgrounds that
help to deepen our understanding of modern Chinese architecture, in particular,
and twentieth-century China, in general. They are from a variety of institutions in
the United States, Europe, mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Australia,
many with educational or academic experiences in two or three of these regions.
The collective effort of these scholars results in this rich, complex, and panoramic
volume.

The fifteen chapters are grouped into three parts. In part 1 (“Divergence to
Convergence"), two articles, "Chinese Architecture on the Eve of the Beaux-Arts,"
by Nancy Steinhardt, and "Just What Was Beaux-Arts Architectural Composi
tion?" by David Van Zanten, introduce the two distinctive traditions before they
met, laying the foundations for further discussions on the complex interactions
between them. Steinhardts article summarizes the formal characters and funda

mental principles of traditional Chinese architecture and spatial design, highlight

ing those features compatible with the Beaux-Arts design principles. Though
mainly addressing the question of why Chinas first generation of architects was
especially attracted to Beaux-Arts, the article offers not only a succinct historical
background of the encounter, but also basic knowledge about traditional Chinese
architecture, its most eminent examples, texts (e.g., Yingzao fashi), technical details
(e.g., modularity), and production mode (e.g., jiangren). From the other side of the
Chinese-Beaux-Arts marriage, David Van Zanten examines the key aspects of the
Beaux-Arts approach in architectural design, which is not only an assemblage of
formal features (e.g., symmetry, axis, eclecticism, and monumentality), but also a
design philosophy and working process. His article also explains the way the
American Beaux-Arts, represented by Paul Philippe Crets system at the University
of Pennsylvania, from which many first-generation Chinese architects learned
architecture, transformed the elitist practice of the French Ecole des Beaux-Arts
into a professional training system highlighting compositional eloquence.
With the foundations laid out by the previous two articles, part 2 ("Conver
gence to Influence") delves into the details about how Beaux-Arts influences
Chinese architecture in different times and locations. The first two articles are

both related to architectural education. Tony Atkins article, "Chinese Architecture

Students at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1920s: Tradition, Exchange, and
the Search for Modernity," focuses on the most influential place and person during
the first stage of the transmission of Beaux-Arts to China, Philadelphia and Paul
Cret, respectively, and their impact on some of the most famous first-generation

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326 China Review International: Vol. 17, No. 3, 2010

Chinese architects (e.g., Liang Sicheng, Yang Tingbao, Tong Jun, and Chen Zhi).
The next step, how these Penn-trained Chinese students brought what they
learned abroad home and started Chinas own modern architectural education, is

considered by Gu Daqing in his chapter "An Outline of Beaux-Arts Education in

China: Transplantation, Localization, and Entrenchment." Using the School of
Architecture at Southeast University as an example, Gu divides modern Chinese
architectural education into three major phases: from 1927 to the early 1950s，when
the earliest architectural schools were founded following foreign models; from the
early 1950s to the early 1980s, when the Beaux-Arts method was integrated with
Chinese content and became the mainstream in Chinas architectural education;

and from the early 1980s to the present, when the Beaux-Arts system was both
enriched and challenged by other models.
The last two articles in part 2 are both related to the way Beaux-Arts adapted
to changing political situations. Focusing on Chinese architecture of the 1950s, K.
Sizheng Fans article, "A Classicist Architecture For Utopia: The Soviet Contacts,"
examines the impact of Stalinist classicism (called socialist realism in the Soviet
Union and China) on Chinese architecture and city planning. Sharing with Beaux
Arts the common heritage of classicism and eclecticism, Soviet socialist realism
can be easily accepted by the Chinese architects and educators, who were mostly
trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition. The Beaux-Arts method, thus, was reframed

to serve the socialist ideology. Fu Chao-Chings article, "Beaux-Arts Practice and

Education by Chinese Architects in Taiwan," provides a succinct outline of the
Beaux-Arts influence on Taiwanese architecture during different historical stages,
from the period of Japanese colonization (1895-1945) to the post-1949 period,
when Taiwan became the seat of the central nationalist government and the
mainland immigrant architects brought more Beaux-Arts legacy to the island.
Part 3 ("Influence to Paradigm") provides more detailed case studies on
individual architects, buildings, and special issues of racism, ritual, and city plan
ning. The nine articles in this part are further grouped into three sections. The first
section concentrates on three prominent first generation architect-architectural
historians. In "Yang Tingbao, Chinas Modern Architect in the Twentieth Century,"
Xing Ruan argues that being modern is a moral rather than a formal issue. Moder
nity concerns the common well-being of all peoples instead of overt emphasis on
cultural specificity of a single nation. In this sense, Yang Tingbao is a modern
architect. Seng Kuans "Between Beaux-Arts and Modernism: Dong Dayou and the
Architecture of 1930s Shanghai" concentrates on the life and career of Dong
Dayou, especially his "Greater Shanghai Plan" and the in-depth individual archi
tectural design of its civic center. Using private houses as examples, this chapter
also demonstrates that though trained mainly in the Beaux-Arts tradition, Dong
was capable of a variety of design method, including modernism. In the third
article, "Elevation or Façade: A Re-evaluation of Liang Sichengs Interpretation of
Chinese Timber Architecture in the Light of Beaux-Arts Classicism," Zhao Chen

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 Reviews 327

offers a rare criticism of Liang Sicheng, arguing that Liangs compositional analysis
of the elevations of ancient buildings is a misinterpretation of traditional Chinese
architecture, a result of his deep-rooted Western Beaux-Arts focus on façade.
Although also focusing on either individual architects or buildings, the four
articles in the second section of part 3 are more diversified, both thematically
and methodologically. Using Lu Yanzhis career as the primary example, Jeffrey
Codys article "From Studio to Practice: Chinese and Non-Chinese Architects
Working Together” explores the difficulties一mainly racial prejudice—the newly
graduated Chinese architecture students encountered when they started practic
ing in the real world. Cody classifies three different working environments, which
he calls "niches," in which early Chinese architects chose to work in order to
survive and compete with foreign firms. Focusing on the Sun Yat-sen Memorial
in Nanjing by Lii Yanzhi, Rudolf Wagners "Ritual, Architecture, Politics, and
Publicity during the Republic: Enshrining Sun Yat-sen" gives a brilliant analysis
of the political struggles over the rituals to commemorate the founding father of
the Chinese Republic and demonstrates that architecture is part of the propa
ganda to legitimize particular political claims. Dealing with Lii Yanzhi's memorial
structure for Sun, Delin Lais "The Sun Yat-sen Memorial Auditorium: A Preach

ing Space for Modern China" is methodologically quite different from Wagners
article. Supported by a formal rather than textual analysis of architecture, Lais
article establishes a typological connection between the Christian church and the
modern Chinese auditorium, which he names the "preaching space," and argues
that the creation of the auditorium serves modern Chinas nation-building project.
Last in this section, Yung Ho Chang's "Zhang vs. Zhang—Symmetry and Split: A
Development in Chinese Architecture in the 1950s and 1960s” analyzes the key
works by two famous architects, Zhang Bo and Zhang Kaiji, working mainly
during the Peoples Republic period (1949-), and suggests that the stylistic
differences between the two Zhangs may result from their different family
backgrounds.
The third section in part 3 is on modern Chinese city planning, with Peter
Carroll's "The Beaux-Arts in Another Register: Governmental Administrative and
Civic Centers in City Plans of the Republican Era" and Zhang Jies "Chinese
Urbanism beyond the Beaux-Arts" dealing with the periods before and after 1949,
respectively. Carroll's article samples the legacy of the Beaux-Arts design in cities
of national (Shanghai, Nanjing), regional (Guangzhou), and local (Suzhou) levels
during the Republican period. Zhang Jies article, on the other hand, explores a
variety of forces—social, political, cultural, economical, and commercial—that
have shaped contemporary Chinese cities. The book concludes with Joseph
Rykwerts "Afterword: The Four and the Five" which attempts to reveal the differ
ence between the Chinese and Western spatial concepts by delving into their
cultural roots. Rykwert suggests that the Chinese notion of the center, in addition
to the symmetry made by the four cardinal directions, creates a vast difference, a

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 328 China Review International: Vol. 17, No. 3, 2010

difference between "the Five” (Chinese) and "the Four” (West), that dooms the
Beaux-Arts as a mismatch for Chinese architecture.

The articles collected in this book represent a wide spectrum in the current
scholarship on modern Chinese architecture and urbanism. In general, articles
by Chinese authors are rich in statistical data and new material, while those by
Western or Western-trained authors are characterized by new perspectives and
fresh interpretations. The term "Beaux-Arts" in the book title is generalized, as it is
applied to almost any eclecticism in architecture. Indeed, some articles have little
to do with the Beaux-Arts (e.g., Fan, Wagner, and Zhang). On the other hand,
such a generalization allows the editors to create an entire panoramic picture of
twentieth-century Chinese architecture and city planning in a single volume
without sacrificing details and to display diversified approaches in the reading of
Chinese architecture and the recent past. In this sense, and without rendering the
contributions of other traditions trivial, it is a good generalization.

Shuishan Yu

Shuishan Yu is an assistant professor of art history at Oakland University,

specializing in Chinese architecture and Asian arts.

mm
羅齷

Hsiu-Chuang Deppman. Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of

Modern Chinese Fiction and Film. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,

2010. 243 pp. Hardcover $56.00, isbn 978-0-8248-3373-2. Paperback $27.00,

isbn 978-0-8248-3454-8.

The remarkable achievement of Chinese film directors in adapting fiction into film
has long challenged the boundary between Chinese literature and cinema as two
seemingly separate academic fields of study. Few books, however, have offered a
comprehensive and in-depth comparative study of Chinese literary works and
their cinematic adaptations. Hsiu-Chuang Deppmans Adapted for the Screen: The
Cultural Politics of Chinese Fiction and Film fills this gap. As the author notes, one
inherent challenge of studying Chinese adaptations lies in "the perilous risk of
mixing two infinities” (p. 2), namely that Chinese literature and cinema are both
© 2012 by University produced in a rich intertextual fabric. But Deppman does not seek, as a number of
of Hawai ‘i Press Western adaptation theorists have, to establish universal rules that are applicable
cross-text, cross-cultural context, and cross-media. Instead, she fully acknowledges
the "empirical messiness of adaptation” and adopts "an approach that is responsive,

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