THE SIXTH CENTURY IN EAST ASIAN ARCHITECTURE

Only two pagodas and one Buddhist pillar stand in China to represent architecture of the sixth century. Other information about buildings in the century before the Tang dynasty (618–907) has heretofore been filled in through written records, contemporary and earlier relief sculpture and painting, and inferences from wooden architecture of the sixth through eighth century in Japan. Korean architecture has rarely been considered in assessments of sixth-century Chinese architecture. This paper proposes a new and deeper understanding of Chinese architecture of the sixth century. To achieve it, literary sources, excavation sites, rock-carved caves, tombs, relief sculpture, murals, pagodas, and a pillar are examined together with approximately ten building sites from the sixth and seventh centuries in Korea and aboveground and excavated remains of the seventh and eighth centuries in Japan. The paper shows that shared structural details and building plans existed in religious and funerary architecture across East Asia in the sixth century; South Asian architecture was an important source of pagodas in sixth-century China; monastery configurations unknown in China were constructed in Korea and Japan; and, perhaps most surprisingly, architecture of the Eastern Han period (23–220), particularly rock-carved architecture in cliff tombs in Sichuan province, provides prototypes of sixth-century architectural forms. Links between the Eastern Han and the sixth through eighth century are further emphasized through an examination of domes and eight-sided structures.