Ancient Chinese buildings have always been beautiful to me. There is something about the architecture that is really fascinating. I mean look at the picture above! It is gorgeous! After looking into that type of building I found out something crazy. The building is not even made with nails!
That is right! These buildings called Dougong’s were buildings created without nails. How these structures are made is incredible. So, how are these beautiful buildings made?
A base block called a “Dou” is placed down. This is followed up by placing a “Gong” into the Dou to support wooden beams or another Dou. After doing this multiple times throughout the structure, they basically even themselves out. After doing this x amount of times depending on the building, you would get the roof. What I think is the crazy part about these structures is that there are 30 different types of combinations. You would think there would only be about 5 or so options considering that there a no nails or anything like that so your building designs would be limited. These buildings were commonly made during the Ming Dynasty. These types of buildings were very popular. It was also believed that the more brackets in a building, the more superior that building was. Naturally, a lot of buildings were built with the intent to be very tall. If they weren’t tall, they could always add on to them
References
Hernandez, Marco. “The Dougong: A Nailless Chinese Construction Method.” South China Morning Post. June 11, 2018. Accessed October 14, 2020. https://multimedia.scmp.com/culture/article/forbidden-city/architecture/chapter_02.html?src=follow-chapter.
