Salar Libalou Building Craftsmanship
01 · Historical Records
In the Yuan dynasty, the Salar ancestors settled in Mengda Village and began building flat-roofed walled courtyard dwellings. The overall layout of the fence-tower building is varied, with forms such as the triple-courtyard, the corner, and the transverse-character types, generally facing south.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
The ancient Salar fence-tower dwelling-building craft now survives only in Mengda Village, Qingshui Township, in the eastern part of Xunhua Salar Autonomous County, Qinghai Province. The tower courtyard consists of a gate, the tower body, and a flat-roofed house, with the gate opening to the southeast and the tower base as the main building of the courtyard. The fence-tower building commonly takes the form of three, five, or six bays, with a depth of two bays; the lower wall course mixes stone and fence, the upper mixes plank and fence, and one may ascend by an inclined plank ladder. The wall foundation is stone-and-mud composite masonry, the enclosing wall is rammed earth, and the doors and windows have their own particular finishing. The second-story eaves, the balustrades, and the gate lintel eaves are generally decorated with woodcarving, with many patterns and colors, exquisitely fine. The tower body is spacious, clear, and simple yet elegant. The gate mostly adopts a four-post two-beam form, and some are passage-type beneath the tower. The courtyard contains a flower bed for planting flowers, fruit trees, and the like.
Three-sided, corner and cross-shaped plans
Plans take three-sided, corner and cross shapes, all facing south with the tower as the principal building.
Walls of stone and woven twigs
The lower walls mix stone with woven twigs for weight and damp-proofing, the upper level mixes boards with twigs for lightness.
A plank ladder set on the slant
A sloping plank ladder reaches the upper floor without occupying ground space, easy to move as the household moves.
Four posts and two beams at the gate
Gates are commonly built on four posts and two beams, sometimes forming a passage under the tower, and open to the southeast.
Carved eaves, railings and lintels
Eaves, railings and gate lintels carry the finest carving, exactly where people stand and look up.
From Mengda and Baizhuang to Dahejia
Between the Ming and Qing many such houses were built at Mengda, Baizhuang and Dahejia, forming a distinctively Salar building group.
Flat-roofed compounds since the Yuan
Since the Yuan the ancestors of the Salar settled at Mengda and built flat-roofed compounds, the line from which these tower houses grew.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
By the Ming and Qing periods, many fence-towers were built around Mengda and Baizhuang in Xunhua Salar Autonomous County, Qinghai, and the Dahejia area in Gansu Province, forming a Salar-style architectural cluster rich in local character.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
The craft of building the Salar ancient fence-tower dwelling is the crystallization of the wisdom of the Salar people and an important component of the architectural culture of China's ethnic minorities; it has important reference value for studying the Salar people's society, history, economy, and cultural conditions. Majinming (per the official archive record of the associated inheritor): male, Salar, born November 1949, a native of Xunhua Salar Autonomous County, Qinghai Province. Representative inheritor of the third national-level batch of the intangible cultural heritage item Salar Fence-Tower Building Craft. Salar fence-tower building artisan. To fully transmit the fence-tower building craft, he investigated and compiled materials on fence-weaving technique, successively publishing several papers in newspapers and journals such as China Culture Daily, authored and published Salar Fence-Tower in the national-level intangible cultural heritage series, and completed the manuscript of the book Ancient Salar Architecture. Having learned the craft from his father since childhood as the sixth-generation inheritor of the fence-tower building technique, in recent years he has opened classes to teach, and has now cultivated five key county-level inheritors of the fence-tower building craft to rescue and protect it. He received the second Xingchuan Award for Intangible Cultural Heritage Inheritors, issued by the Chinese Academy of Arts (Center for the Protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage of China).
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Ma Jinming 03-1439
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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