Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 2.djvu/554

 454 CHINESE ARCHITECTURE. BOOK IX. one under the other ; these brackets could only be attached properly to the columns carrying the roof (generally 6 ft. apart, and sometimes more), so that additional brackets were required on each side to give further support to the horizontal beam or plates carrying the rafters. This led to a construction of which Woodcut No. 491 will give some better conception ; this illustra- tion is from the Temple at Nikko in Japan, but as there is scarcely any pattern in the latter country which has not been borrowed from China it is equally representative of either. Another peculiarity which also gives a local character to all this architecture is the method of framing a roof so unlike that of other people. In early times, and in their domestic work down to the present day, the timber most available for this pur- pose was either the bambu or a small pine, which, like most endo- gens, is soft and spongy in the in- side, while the outer rings of wood are close- grained, hard, and strong: it is thus practically a hollow wooden cylinder, which, if squared to form a framing as we do, would fall to pieces; but merely Bracket Group. cleaned and used whole, it is a very strong and durable building material, though one which requires all a Chinaman's ingenuity and neatness to frame together with sufficient rigidity for the purposes of a roof. The roof is usually constructed (as shown in Woodcut No. 489) by using three or four transverse pieces or tie-beams, one over the other, the ends of each beam being supported on that below it by means of a framed piece of a different class of wood. By this method, though to us it may look unscientific, they make up a framing that resists the strongest winds un- injured. Of course the theory here put forward refers more particularly to houses in which the employment of bambu and the small pine still obtains, but drawings in the National Library in Paris show that in the 5th and 4th century B.C., their temples and