Confucius’ Courtyard: Architecture, Philosophy and the Good Life in China

Cover\nHalftitle page\nAbout author\nTitle page\nCopyright page\nDedication\nContents\nIllustrations\nAcknowledgements\nPrologue\n	I\n	II\n	III\n	IV\n	V\nPart One Heaven A Panacea from the Courtyard\n1 What Makes the Chinese House\n	The conceptual parti\n	Confucius’ courtyard\n	From object to void\n2 Heaven and What Is Below\n	The Chinese tian\n	The King’s City\n	The built world and the literary world\nPart Two Heaven and Earth Equilibrium in the Courtyard\n3 The Divergent Tower\n	The emergence of the individual and metaphysics\n	Immortality and freedom imagined\n4 Secluded World and Floating Life\n	The middling hermit\n	The artful transition\n5 A Deceiving Symbol\n	The travelling merchant and the oddity of their courtyard\n	Women in Chinese marriage and household\n	Behind good taste and refinement\n6 Literary Enchantment and the Garden House\n	Li Yü’s world\n	Internalized garden and the ‘horizon’ beyond\n	Courtyard and decorum\n7 The Golden Mean Finely Tuned\n	The anatomy of a Beijing quadrangle\n	Life and ambience in the Hutong\n	The city as a large quadrangle\n	Distinctive character versus uniformity\n8 Living like ‘the Chinese’\n	The ‘guest’ Chinese and their Chinese courtyards\n	Chinese form and exotic meaning\nPart Three Earth The Emancipation of Desire and the Loss of Courtyard\n9 The Irresistible Metropolis\n	Modern city born of refugee crisis\n	From diminishing courtyard to porous house\n10 The Assault of Modernity\n	Quadrangle without the Confucian world\n	The lingering courtyard\n	Nothingness, horizon and discreet pleasure\nEpilogue: The Four or the Five\nNotes\nIndex