Review

Reviewed Work(s): Chinese Traditional Architecture by Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, Fu

Xinian, Else Glahn, Robert Thorp and Annette Juliano
Review by: Alexander Coburn Soper
Source: Artibus Asiae, Vol. 45, No. 2/3 (1984), pp. 233-238
Published by: Artibus Asiae Publishers
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3249734
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In the Pelican Press Japan ruder drawings by the process, the changes in the shape of the horizontal
present reviewer show four sub-monumental arm, shua-t'ou, that may project above a beak; and
bracket types, and the one-ang scheme used for the to a real problem of stresses and strains, the shape
Haryfiji Golden Hall (borrowed from Korea, and of the longitudinal "lintel" or "architrave" that
by Korea presumably from Six Dynasties China), joins the wall pillars at the level of their tops. In
p. 188. The two later members of the Japanese T'ang this is an I-beam, since the brackets rise only
sequence, the Yakushiji pagoda and the Tashadaiji from the columns. The Sung and Chin solution,
Golden Hall, are shown in perspective on pp. 19o with uniform brackets to hold, produces a T-beam,
and i92. The last is likely to have been a South with an upper, wider member resting flat on the
Chinese design carried to Japan with a famous lintel. The eventual design makes the I unnecessari-
missionary by craftsmen and a master builder at the ly heavy and the T narrower, so mere size does the
mid 8th century. P. 245 shows in section and per- work.

spective the developed Zen scheme outside, and The final "Evolution," plate of masonry pagodas,
(p. 247) inside. P. 246 shows the late 13th century brings together 44 tiny example drawings under
complex, apparently taken from an unusually im- five design headings, between A.D. 450 and 1928,
aginative South Chinese original, in the small Relic and 44 photographs.
Hall of Engakuji, in Kamakura town. The Pelican One source of minor irritation: apparently for aes-
China p. 247 shows cross-sections of T6sh6daiji thetic reasons, page numbers occur only at the
and the Liao dynasty Hai-hui-tien; pp. 248, 251, upper left hand corner of left-hand pages. Many are
2 51 various drawings (these by a Pelican draftsman) simply omitted; there are none between 7o and 82.
of Fo-kuang-ssu, the view showing the contrast Institute of Fine Arts Alexander C. Soper
between column-head and intercolumnar brackets
being particularly noteworthy. Nancy ShatZman Steinhardt, Chinese Traditional Arch-
The otherwise largely obsolescent Soper disserta- itecture (with Fu Xinian, Else Glahn, Robert Thorp,
tion, The Evolution of Buddhist Architecture in Japan, and Annette Juliano), China Institute in America, iR84,
Princeton U. P. 1942, shows the same four stages I.M pp., phs. under ii subjects, comprising as many as ii
in perspective, from HMrfuji to the Zen style, in figs. each, chiefly drawings. Chronological table, outline
figs. 5 1-554. Figs. 140, 141 show two Sung versions, map of sites, specialized Bibliography, with entries in
one showing a concealed slanting arm on the in- English, European and Far Eastern languages, page on
terior only, and the other double false beaks from romaniZation. No Chinese characters.
a late 1 zth century Taoist hall in Soochow, the In the late spring of I984, a small exhibition of
San-ch'ing-tien. Figs. 139 and 142 show two very Chinese traditional architecture was held in the
similar Zen chapel complexes, the Relic Hall (with Asia House Gallery in New York. A catalogue,
one beak) and the 1327 Shakad6 of Umeda. In the which from the outset was expected to be unusual,
latter's "Order", the lower of two beaks is false; was entrusted to Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, a
but on the interior a true ang is braced more effec- recent Harvard Ph. D. and member of the History
tively by a lower arm on a more acute angle. Fig. 399 of Art faculty of the University of Pennsylvania.
shows the V-arm design used to hold the roof of The exhibition, designed to fit into the Gallery's
the 7th century HMryfaji verandah corridors. Fig. 66 restricted space, turned out to be both educational
shows a crisply carved "camel's hump" (called in
and fascinating. Almost all of the items displayed,
Japan a kaerumata, frog's legs), resting on a cross- and a major share of the material used in the cat-
beam of the 8th century Hokked6 chapel of T6-
alogue, information, expert measured drawings
daiji. and perspectives, and a few useful photographs,
In the last three Ming and Ch'ing examples of
came from a branch of the Ministry of Culture in
Liang's plate of "Orders" one or two false beaks
Beijing, through the section chief, Jin Feng. Much
may remain, at diminutive scale, but the slantinguse was made also of the published reports of
tail has disappeared, and horizontals rule unchal-
members of the Society for Research in Chinese
lenged.
Architecture, active in the I93o's at Peking (then
A double-page spread with two more "Evolution"
Peiping); especially from its most active and best
plates, 37 and 38, is given to one rather trivial
qualified member, the late Liang Ssu-ch'eng (today

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called Liang Sicheng, in the CPR's official pinyin). The manual, published by the Ministry of Public
By a happy coincidence Liang's majesterial book, Works and written (or compiled or sponsored) by
A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture (in Eng- a professional named Li Jie (Chiai), was presented
lish) has just been posthumously published by the to the Sung emperor in 1oo3. Its usefulness
M. I. T. Press, through the expert editing of a long- brought a second edition in I145, after the dy-
time friend, Wilma Fairbank, and is reviewed by nasty's flight southward to Hangzhou. In succeed-
me above. A great deal of Liang's knowledge is ing centuries, however, all printed copies disap-
presented in carefully lettered measured drawings. peared, and the book was kept barely alive by
There are far more illustrations than in Shatzman's manuscript copies. In the I920's and I930's its
catalogue, and the two works may be used very historical importance was realized by a new group
effectively together. One noteworthy disadvantage of enthusiasts in Beijing, the young members of the
is that Liang completed his book in 1946, after Society mentioned above, and especially by Liang
spending the war years under harsh refugee con- Ssu-ch'eng (and even far away by ACSoper, who
ditions in far western Szechwan (pinyin Sichuan). was learning to read Chinese by translating the
Followers from the I930's, and now a new genera- Society's quarterly reports - they were in pai-hua
tion of specialists working in Beijing under the and easy - until he ran up against a quotation from
CPR., have pushed speculation, or understanding, that horrendous Sung text). A wealthy amateur had
of the most challenging problems an impressive published a handsome printed text in 1925, taken
stage further, of course in Chinese. Their con- from a manuscript. The least successful portion was
clusions are found throughout Steinhardt's cat- the illustrations, since noone in the long sequence
alogue, fairly considered (but not as dogma). of scribes had any idea what they meant; to cap the
At the head of the book is an introductory survey climax, the manual referred to a large number of
of the field by Fu Xinian (Hsi-nien), a longtime structural members by names that were no longer
member of the Research Institute of the History of understandable, and literally were gibberish. Actu-
Architecture in Beijing, "who for the past three ally they must have been terms used orally by
decades has been one of China's most eminent craftsmen, which when written down were assig-
archaeologists and scholars of Chinese architec- ned characters as phonetic equivalents, irrespective
of their sense; as if the vocabulary were a foreign
ture." On a general level Fu deals with the chang-
ing shapes of roofs and the bracketing that holdslanguage like Sanskrit.
up their eaves (or pretends to); the calculation The
of Society's ambitions were cut short by the
standardized dimensions for the building's parts,outbreak of war with Japan in 1937. Fortunately it
has proved possible for new enthusiasts since 1949
based on its size and importance; the ease of divid-
to pick up the problems posed by the manual, and
ing interior space, since the columns usually bear
the weight rather than the walls; decoration by many crucial problems have been solved; I refer to
painting etc.; courtyard spaces, and analogous what Steinhardt calls Reference Plates, two of
which deal with building designs in the Sung offi-
spaces in the planned grid city; and gardens. The
bulk of Fu's chapter is devoted to a summarizedcial manner, which I discuss below.
history from Neolithic beginnings to the end of theThe Yingzaofashi's first two chapters were obvious-
empire in 19 11. The illustrations are his own, effec-provided to satisfy the dynasty's obsession with
ly
tively drawn at the introductory level. backward-looking scholarship; they consist of a
The first chapter of the text proper deals with an long list of architectural terms with respectable
official manual of architectural practise, the Yingzao written antecedents, set beside quotations from
fashi (formerly Ying-tsaofa-shih), completed in 1 io3,
early texts (the Classics, early literature, early his-
intensively studied first by Liang and later by the tory etc.) in which they are named.
Danish Professor Else Glahn, of the University of To quote Professor Glahn: "The Yingzao fashi
Aarhus, "one of Europe's principal scholars of consists of 34 chapters .. . The work can be divided
Chinese traditional architecture," the present into four parts: rules, labor, material, and draw-

author. A later general chapter, "The Bracketing ings. The first part deals with construction meth-
System of the Song Dynasty," a subject closely ods for different structural members. The second

linked to the 1 i03 manual, is by Steinhardt. ... discusses work units, that is the amount of work

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for each category that a skilled artisan is expected identify the members shown by reference to a list
to carry out in one day. The third part ... lists the that for the larger 1zth century design totals 48
amount of material needed for each type of work items in pinyin romanization and English. Chinese
and the ratio of ingredients for mortar, plaster, characters also are given, but at the reduced scale
pigments, and glaze. The fourth part... consists of of the plate, perhaps 1/2 or 1/4 the original, they are
drawings ... Each of the four parts is subdivided almost illegible. An original drawing at a more
into 12 sections: moats and fortifications, stone generous scale probably made it possible to draw
work, carpentry, joinery, wood carving, turning and keep track in the places that now seem impos-
and drilling, sawing, bamboo work, plastering, sibly complex.
painting and decoration, brick work, and the man- Chapter 2, the "Architectural Heritage of the
ufacture of tiles." Bronze Age," by Robert L. Thorp, begins by
characterizing Shang advances beyond the Neo-
Of special interest are those sections that show the
use of standard measuring units, in a variety of lithic: side-by-side chambers enclosed by pounded
cases. The craftsman is to work from sun-up to earth walls, capable of supporting a large roof, and
sun-down, a period based on the length of the day raised on a pounded earth platform. Thorp illustra-
(in middle North China) in spring and autumn, tes and briefly cites the two halls linked in some
i 0% longer in summer and shorter in winter, so way to Shang royalty: Erlitou Palace no. 2 of Early
that he will be paid more or less at those times. Shang date, set in a courtyard surrounded by pill-
Most curious is the standardization of measure- ared galleries, and the Middle Shang Panlongcheng
ments of eight types of hall, from those of monu- site, Hebei, in the middle Yangtzu valley, a mar-
mental scale that are nine to eleven spans, or bays,
kedly long hall which seems to have had a thatched
wide on down (the width of the audience hall,
hip roof and a low, light portico holding a separate
Taihedien (T'ai-ho-tien) in the Beijing Palace). The
leanto roof below the main eaves. A two-courtyard
module employed is i o% of the depth of the stan- scheme found at Fengchu, NW Shaanxi (Shensi),
dard eaves bracketing arm, and is called a fen. In the
dated late second millennium B.C. and so presum-
ably Zhou (Chou), features a hall bounded by and
sixth grade of hall, for example, where the fen will
be 0.4 "inches," the central facade bay will be 375enclosing four rows of seven columns, measuring
17 by 6 meters. These must have been intended to
fen across and the side bays 2 So fen. The central bay
will be allotted two intercolumnar bracketing
support a good share of the roof, here thought to
units, and the side bays one. "By similar means the
be of thick mud-plaster; there were "solid, poun-
other missing members were found for the height ded-earth exterior walls on three sides." In the
of columns, the depth of eaves, and the lengthsame
of general area a later hall showed one system of
rafters ..." It should be possible to check these
interior columns at its ends, and another at its
numbers with the measurements of existing build-center, this last perhaps intended to support a hip
roof.
ings of the Sung period. In fact one of the currently
active Beijing specialists, Chen Mingda, has carried
The one truly spectacular find has been a late fourth
out checks on 27 buildings remaining from that century royal tomb complex belonging to the War-
period, and has found not rigid conformity but a Kingdoms state of Zhongshan (Chung-chan in
ring
general agreement. Hebei). There the building type was raised around
What Steinhardt calls "Reference Illustrations" an earth core, topped by a square hall of five or six
bays. Two such mortuary temples were found,
comprise highly educational drawings of five rep-
resentative buildings, associated with centuries. serving a king and at smaller scale his consort. A
The two that stand for the I zth are theoretical unique find was a bronze plate cast so as to show
examples based on the Yingzao fashi. The aother
necropolis of five halls set in an east-west row,
three, that represent the 9th, I4th, and I 5 th cen- with the king's at the center, and doubly walled in.
turies, are important large halls, relatively complex
Steinhardt's choice for presentation in the Han age,
in design. Each building is presented in an chapter 3, the "Han Ritual Hall," was a find in the
ingenious formal drawing that shows both a suf- southern suburbs of Changan, preferably called a
ficient fraction of the facade and a fully detailed mingtang or bright hall. The remains showed what
perspective view through the interior. Numbers was apparently a square main hall, raised above

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shallow projections on its four sides, thus recalling "the remains of a traditional Chinese pavilion-type
the Chinese character ya, or a stubby Greek-cross roof carved in the stone" (p. 86). Thus Yungang set
plan. An attractive identification for this makes it the precedent for a facade design found in later
one of the ritual buildings mentioned in the Han versions at Maiji shan, Tianlong shan, and Xiang-
History, as having been erected by the usurper tang shan.
Wang Mang at the end of Western Han. The cen- Chapter 5 by Steinhardt, the "Hanyuan Hall," deals
tral hall with its square pounded-earth foundation with the reconstruction, on paper, of the great
rose from a larger circular platform. That in turn throne hall erected in 662-663 in the Taming Pal-
marked the center of a very much larger pounded- ace, at Chang'an. Remaining pillar holes show that
earth square, holding gate-houses centered on each this gigantic building was 67.33 meters wide by
of its four sides. 29.2 deep, stood on a terrace about Io meters high,
Steinhardt believes that the Han building was an and was flanked by corridors leading out and then
attempted continuation of the ancient royal ming- forward to terminate in corner pavilions. (The
tang, which legend attributed to one or another of published view of the complex from the front and
the five "emperors" of the Golden Age. "By the below the stairs, in perspective with a dramatic
first millennium B.C. the functions of the mingtang wash rendering, is reminiscent of Beaux Arts theat-
had greatly expanded." She quotes from an 18th ricality). The drawings as published are much too
century A.D. treatise full of earlier quotations: diminished in size to be more than instructive at

"(It) was the center of imperial power and an first sight. No surviving wooden members have
integral space in the life of the king." Actually, been found. Reconstruction, via the drawing
citations prior to the Western Han are very in- board, has been worked out from the terrace floor
frequent, however. The most telling is one found up on the basis of pictorial evidence, presumably
from wall paintings at Dunhuang and from the
in Mencius I, ii, v, 1-2 (Legge 16 1, as a dialogue be-
tween the philosopher and King Hsfian of the Ch'i T'ang princely tombs. The drawings of the interior
state (reigned 45 5-405). The king says that people shown in cross and longitudinal sections, are in-
have been advising him to pull down his mingt'ang, debted to the design of the Foguang si hall, a
which presumably was no longer useful. In Legge's century later.
much amplified answer Mencius says, "The Hall of As a postscript Steinhardt relays information and
distinction is a hall appropriate to the sovereigns. theories concerning a very different, mid-eighth
If your Majesty wishes to practise the true royal century palace building at Chang'an, the Linde
government, then do not pull it down." Banqueting Hall. Surviving ground-plan features
When the Chou king lost the exclusive use of royal show three adjacent parallel components with dif-
perquisites, after the 7th century B. C., the feudal ferent dimensions. The reviewer believes that no

lords who began to usurp the throne must have such combination is known elsewhere in the Chi-

taken over the mingtang, if one existed to imitate. To nese tradition. Chinese archaeologists have sugges-
the present reviewer it seems most likely that the ted several solutions for the treatment of roofs.

building was earlier called by some other name. For Steinhardt's bird's-eye view shows one in which
further argument see the Pelican China, pp. 212- the middle block is a storey higher than the imm-
ediately visible front-entrance block; and is some-
213.
what higher, also, than the narrow rear block. The
Chapter 4, "New Discoveries at the Yungang
Caves," by Annette Juliano, discusses the visible three "halls" of the Linde complex lead directly
evidence that the imperial cave shrines 9 and io from one to the next, without any linkage by con-
were originally provided with wooden fore-build- necting corridors.

ings, traceable now by columns and beam holes. Chapter 6, the "Nanchan si Main Hall," concerns
Long after the Northern Wei seven-column build-a very small Buddha hall on Mt. Wutai, the great
ing was destroyed, a five-bay replacement with its pilgrimage area in northern Shansi. Constructed at
own holes was constructed under the Liao, whose some time during the first half of Tang, prior to a
Western Capital was at Datong (Ta-t'ung). Again: repair record of 782, and so the earliest remaining
above the stone facade of cave I 2 with its rock-cut wooden structure in China. The building measures

sculptured dragon pillars, excavators in 1973 foundI 1.75 by I 0 meters, has no interior columns, and

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uses proper bracketing only over the column tops. descriptive rather than translated. It should be
A cross-section shows a rudimentary truss instead possible to compare without embarrassment this
of a kingpost. The roof was the gable-and-hip form evolution with the changing life of the Gothic rib,
proper to its small size, with an unusally low slope from Durham, say, to the Chapel of Henry VII.
of I to 5.5. The lower and upper cross beams are Chapter 9, the "Yuan Dynasty Main Hall: Guang-
separated by camel's hump blocks. sheng si Lower Monastery and Yongle gong"
Chapter 7, the "Xing Xian (Hsing-hsien) Timber (Yungle-kung) discusses adjacent monasteries in
Pagoda," deals with a unique wooden survivor the Fen River valley, southern Shansi, the first
from the Liao dynasty, dated I o56. The temple's Buddhist and the second Taoist. From the first
name is Fogong si; Liang calls the location Ying were bought the monumental Buddha-group wall
Hsien (p. 68, fig. 3 ia-d). Octagonal, five storeys, paintings that now grace the walls of several Amer-
and 67.3 meters tall, this tower stands apart from ican museums. The Taoist establishment still re-
the other Liao and Chin pagoda survivors, all of tains its more varied compositions in situ.
which are of masonry and radically different in The Lower Monastery's Main Hall is simple and
design. A closer cousin is the I zth century Liuhe economical, with a gabled roof and no intercolum-
Pagoda at Hangzhou. Unique also is the fact that nar brackets. Liang figs. 47 a-e illustrate three dif-
its eaves exhibit no less than 54 different bracketing ferent halls, two of which show an extraordinary
designs, presumably intended for 54 different uses local feature: the use of "enormous ang" like young
- including for show. Six are illustrated by draw- tree-trunks that reach all the way to the middle of
ings. One ingenious version shown in a Liang the hall (and show a surprising similarity to what
photograph, tackles the problem of support at a is habitual in Japan). For some reason Steinhardt
corner of the eaves by adapting the Liao diagonal says nothing about the ang, instead analysing the
axis formula. The corner proper requires support very detailed system shown in her Reference Illu-
on a diagonal; in the complementary sense, project- stration 4.
ing toward the middle of the bay, a shorter, simpler The donors to the almost contiguous Taoist estab-
diagonal runs out in four steps, all horizontal. lishment must have been more generous, for the
(There's a challenge to draw!) The most complex three formal halls of Yongle gong are well equip-
design that can be shown diagrammatically (plate ped. The largest, the Sanging Hall, is seven bays
across with a hipped roof and the bracket spacing
7-9) has true paired cantilever arms, ang: the draw-
ing compares this with a very similar scheme on the that the Sung had legitimized, two intercolumnar
Foguang si Main Hall; with a smaller scale version units in every bay except the narrower ends, which
recommended in the Yingzao manual; and with a have one apiece. The other two, named Chunyang
third in which the two beaks are both false. For the
and Zhongyang after two Taoist figures, are five
pagoda design as a whole Steinhardt brings out her bays across and have gable-and-hip roofs. For some
most laudatory words, "perfection achieved in the unstated reason Liang failed to report on this tem-
integration of horizontal and vertical ... perfect ple.
proportions that produced not only exquisite Chapter 8, the "Altar of Heaven Complex," deals
beauty but as yet indestructable form," (because of with the changing forms of this imperial precinct
the earthquakes and lightning it has weathered). in Beijing, from the beginning of Ming, when the
Liang, p. 68, calls it "the grand finale of the Age capital was at Nanjing, to the reign of Qianlong
of Vigor;" and has given it a heroically precise (Ch'ien-lung). Then the sizes and numbers of ele-
cross-section. ments were governed by numerology; the odd
In Chapter 8, the "Bracketing System of the Song numbers with Heaven, the even with Earth. Thus
the number nine was used in multiples for the
Dynasty," Steinhardt provides two demonstration
perspectives: a rigorously systematic version from number of the three round terraces, and the balus-
the Yingzao fashi with its shrunken, ornamental ters, which totalled 360. Steinhardt's pl. i0. i0,
descendant in the Qing style; both crowded with p. 149, showing the interior of the Hall of Prayer
numbers which in the Qing plate are tied in with for a Prosperous Year, includes a zone in which the
a list of names, in characters, in pinyin, and in ornamental motif is a shrunken bracketing system,
rising from i 2 ornamental pillars, patterned like
English. The manual's plate gives only English,

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some kind of rug. The present building, with its and religion, it is intriguing to investigate the ex-
three glazed, deep blue roofs, dates from a rebuild- tent of Gupta cultural influence on life in the Kath-
ing in 1890. mandu Valley. Slusser discusses the relevant sour-
Chapter 8, the "Kung Family Mansion," is devoted ces, early Licchavi rulers, Amsuvarman, the Abhira
to the official headquarters of the Confucian sect, Guptas, later Licchavi rulers, relations with India,
with the residences of branches of Confucius' fami- Tibet and China and Licchavi culture (political
ly, the Kong (K'ung) at Qufu (Ch'ti-fu) in Shan- organization, languages, religious climate, architec-
dong. Imperial patronage here began at a newly ture and art).
high level with the first Ming emperor, when the Chapter 3 contains the political and cultural history
then "grandson" of the sage was honored as Duke of the 'Transitional Period of Licchavi Decline

of Yansheng. The public temple to Confucius in

(A.D. 879-Izoo)'. This period can be compared to
the city is a much larger building dated 17 50 (Liang the Dark Ages in Europe because of its scarcity of
fig. 60, a-d), whose facade portico is of marble, source materials (p.41). Scholars usually designate
carved in a dragon pattern. Liang's fig. 6o,d shows the interval between the rule of the wellknown
a Stele Pavilion in the temple grounds, which he Licchavi kings and that of the later Malla kings as
dates i196; it too has marble columns, and the the Thakuri period. They base themselves on the
bracketing both under the main eaves and under
the portico lean-to uses true parallel ang. Stein- occurrence
of this periodofinthe
late designation
chronicles. 'T.hakuri' for rulers
hardt's Plate 1.7, a sample plate from the Yingzao As Slusser argues, this term has been misinter-
manual, is a little simpler than the lean-to system; preted by Western scholars as the name of a ruling
the eaves' system in a Japanese Zen temple, the dynasty, whereas it is only a later honorific title to
Shakada of Umeda, is a very little less ornamental denote superior rank (p.42). She defends the use of
(Soper, Evolution, fig. 139). 'Transitional period' which fits in with the changes
Institute of Fine Arts Alexander C. Soper in the political and cultural circumstances in the
Valley. This term also does not preclude the possi-
Mary Shepherd Slusser, Nepal Mandala: A cultural bility of the reign of Licchavi descendants of the
study of the Kathmandu Valley. Princeton University wellknown earlier Licchavi kings in the Kathman-
Press, Princeton, New Jersey, _y h. Vol. I, text du Valley during this period.
(4pi pp.); Vol.1H, plates (,oo photographs). Slusser also discusses the foreign relations of the
In the last decade Mary Slusser has published an Valley kingdom with Tibet and India. She rejects
impressive series of articles on Nepalese art andthe prevalent assumption of Pdla influence on the
architecture. Furthermore in 198z her major work political events in the Kathmandu Valley during
on the history and culture of the Newars in the the Transitional period. She further states 'that
Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, was published. The fact there were intimate cultural ties between the Pdlas
that she could not find an adequate publication on and Nepal is not in doubt. This is expressed chiefly
Nepal to prepare her for ethnographical work in in religious developments and practices. But, con-
1965 prompted her to write a cultural study on the trary to widely accepted opinion, Pila influence on
Kathmandu Valley. Nepalese art was minimal' (p.46).
Part I, 'Dramatis Personae: the Mortals', is mainly Slusser does not give any details to corroborate her
concerned with the political history of the Valley. statement on Pdla influence on Nepalese art. As is
evident from some following remarks, she opts for
In chapter i the geography of Kathmandu Valley
is discussed and the ancient inhabitants, the the 'simultaneous development solution': 'Stylis-
Newars, are introduced. tically, both the [painted temple] banners and the
miniature manuscript paintings are rooted in the
In chapter z the history of the oldest historical
dynasty, the Licchavis (A.D. 300-879) is discussed. Gupta tradition, which Pila painting also shared'
The Licchavi period in Nepal coincides with the (p. 5o). About the sculptures in this period she
Gupta and post-Gupta periods in India. As the remarks: 'But the carvings are clearly Nepalese,

Gupta period represents a 'classical' phase in the and have little discernible relation with the sculp-
tures created for the Pilas and Senas to the south'
development of Indian culture politically, art his-
torically, scientifically and in respect to literature (p. 50). Evidently Slusser agrees with Pal 1974, 164

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