TY - BOOK ID - 139163148 TI - Yuan : Chinese architecture in a Mongol empire PY - 2024 SN - 9780691240169 PB - Princeton Princeton University Press DB - UniCat UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:139163148 AB - "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1797) One of the most often-quoted of Coleridge's verses, the stanza above does not describe an imaginary or fantastical place. Xanadu, more commonly known as Shengdu, was the summer capital of the Yuan Dynasty of China (1267-1368), built at the height of Mongol rule in Asia. Kublai Khan was the fifth emperor of the Mongol Empire, and founder of the Yuan dynasty. The significant trove of extant Yuan-period works of art and architecture-including sculpture, paintings, temples, and cities-has remained inaccessible to western scholars for decades. Yuan: Chinese Architecture, Mongol Rule is Nancy Steinhardt's career-spanning and meticulous research, enriched by extensive recent fieldwork, and offers the first comprehensive study of the cultural legacy and artistic impact of Mongolian rule on Chinese art and architecture. Steinhardt explores architecture in China and at China's borders during Mongol rule in relation to space, ritual, context, and aesthetics, four issues that have particular importance during the Yuan period but are significant throughout Chinese architectural history. She discusses the architecture that the Mongols encountered along their routes of conquest, and uses the Yutu atlas and Shilin guangji encyclopedia to understand how the Mongols placed cities and palaces in the empire they envisioned as theirs. She examines religious monuments and buildings of all faiths in China at the time, including places for Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, Christian, Islamic, Brahmanical, and Manicheaean rituals. She examines tombs, mansions, and a humble residence, and she tries to articulate a Mongolian aesthetic based on the parts of their empire that included Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Russia, and Iran. In doing so, Steinhardt refutes the idea that the Mongols had no impact on Chinese architectural history, or that Chinese architecture became rigid and derivative after the Yuan dynasty. Drawing on textual sources in numerous languages as well as field studies covering territory from Iran in the East to Korea in the West, Steinhardt's Yuan: Chinese Architecture, Mongol Rule will become the standard text about this critical period of cultural and artistic interaction"-- ER -