"Building French Style" is the most complete architectural technical work in ancient China, which marks the development of ancient architecture in China to a higher stage.
Creating French Style is edited by Song Jiangzuo. More than a hundred years after the founding of the People's Republic of China in the Northern Song Dynasty, great construction was carried out, palaces, government offices, temples and gardens were built one after another, with luxurious and exquisite shapes, corrupt officials in charge of projects, and the state treasury was unable to cope with huge expenses.
Therefore, it is urgent to formulate various design standards, norms, relevant materials, building quotas and indicators, clarify the hierarchy of buildings, the artistic forms of buildings and strict material boundaries to prevent corruption and theft. In the sixth year of Yuan You (109 1), the first edition of "Building French Style" was published by the emperor. The history of this book is called Yuan You French Style.
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The modern significance of "Building French Style" lies in that it reveals the methods used by the rulers of the Northern Song Dynasty in wooden buildings such as palaces, temples, yamen, mansions, etc., which enables us to have a very detailed understanding of the buildings with few physical remains at that time and fills an important link in the development of ancient Chinese architecture.
Through the account in the book, we also know some building equipment and decorations that have never been preserved in existing buildings and are no longer used today, such as laying bamboo nets under eaves to prevent birds, laying woven bamboo mats on indoor floors, using carved plates for rafters, and wrapping beams with carved wooden boards.
The biennial edition of Architectural French has been lost, and it was reprinted in the fifteenth year of Shaoxing in the Southern Song Dynasty (1 145), but it has not been handed down. At the end of the Southern Song Dynasty, Pingjiang Tower was reprinted, and only the residual copies were preserved and repaired in the Yuan Dynasty. The commonly used version is Shi Ding's copy "Architectural Style" (hereinafter referred to as the "Final Edition") found by Mr. Zhu Qiqian in Nanjing Jiangnan Library (now Nanjing Library) in 2009. It is intact and is a small lithograph edition to reduce photocopying. In the second year, the commercial press photocopied the original version.
1925, the Ding edition was collated with the Si Ku Quan Shu, and then printed according to the layout and size of the residual leaves of the Song Dynasty, making it a pottery edition. After that, it was restored and copied into Universal Library by the Commercial Press according to the pottery plate, and reprinted into the popular version on 1954.