Spatial Habitus: Making and Meaning in Asia’s Architecture. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. xix, 290 pp., 8 pp. of coloured plates. (Tables, B&W illustrations.) US$55.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-5370-9.
Time, in Flath’s carefully documented book, passes through Qufu, leaving its indelible marks on Kong Temple, the shrine devoted to Confucius (Kongzi). The temple has withstood centuries of environmental degradation through ongoing, if intermittent, human interventions to maintain it. Kong Temple emerges in this telling as a physical presence greater than those who would use it for personal advancement or political goals. Before the advent of modernity, changes made to the temple and its environs were ultimately “absorbed into the old,” Flath argues (196), but once it was designated as a heritage site in the last century, Kong Temple became subject to a new maintenance regime premised on a binary between the static old and the dynamic present. Kong Temple is a potent relic of the past, yet its politicization during the twentieth century made it vulnerable to conflicting ideas about Chinese modernity; its commercialization in recent decades has produced “the deterioration of the historical environment and unbalanced criteria regarding the definition of historical relics” (198).
In the first half of the book, Flath examines three aspects of Kong Temple, each covering more than a two-thousand-year span of documented history before the Republican era. Chapter 2 examines the social life of the temple as a built artifact subject, in turns, to environmental ruination and human restoration, destruction, and reconstruction. Drawing extensively from stelae inscriptions that date to the time of the events, Flath describes a range of reasons why local officials, Confucian literati, and the imperial court thought Kong Temple should be maintained. “Repairing the old hall and aggrandizing the palaces and buildings,” he quotes an imperial stele dated 220 C.E., “this is how diligent students show respect for their study and this is how we make the rules and law. When the work is done the sage and the gods will protect the realm” (23). This passage, Flath notes, expresses an understanding that “custodial work provides a distinct political advantage … that it is indistinct from scholarship, and … that it is in accord with cosmic pattern” (23). Chapter 3 considers the ritual uses of the temple as material culture: a place of transactions among different temple constituencies. Kong Temple, he argues, was never under any one actor’s control nor were its rites merely a means of performing social relations. Chapter 4 walks the reader through the temple complex from the southern-most entrance through successive courtyards leading to the temple proper and behind it. Flath pauses at several key points to offer important details of their background and context. Here successive rulers, local officials, and Confucian literati inscribed their thoughts in stone in vain attempts to finally define Kong Temple’s meaning. Kong Temple constituted a force to be reckoned with; present exigencies remained at least partially subordinated to the temple’s enduring past.
Flath follows Kong Temple’s changing fate through the crucible that was the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That attitudes toward Kong Temple underwent radical change in the modern era comes as no surprise. But Flath demonstrates that this shift was neither simply linear nor was the break entirely complete, though the differences in attitudes varied greatly. As late as the 1930s, many Nationalist officials, as patrons of Kong Temple rites, still viewed the temple as a powerful ritual site to civilize the restive populace. At the same time the Nationalist government’s position on the temple began to cross a critical divide, from maintaining the temple for its ritual uses, moral effects on the populace, and protection of the regime to protecting the temple as a heritage site, subject to different conceptions of the temple’s purpose. In 1935, the eminent architectural historian, Liang Sicheng, was commissioned to conduct a complete survey of Kong Temple funded, among others, by Jiang Jieshi. Liang “sought to counter the degradation of the historical artifact as well as its wider built environment by introducing the concept of conservation and in situ preservation,” Flath says, yet his scientific study produced drawings in which Kong Temple “appears as a technical anatomy rather than a monument” (143).
In chapter 6, aptly titled “Kong Temple Inc.,” Flath chronicles the deteriorating, if unintended, effects of conservation in the last several decades. The early post-Mao years saw promise that Liang Sicheng’s conservationist model might preserve Qufu’s original built environment. His protégé, Wu Liangyong, recommended a plan to preserve the town’s historical environment while also facilitating tourism with hotel accommodations based on the “national form” of architecture, famously exemplified in Beijing by I.M. Pei’s Fragrant Hills Hotel, which, in Qufu, produced Dai Nianci’s Queli Guesthouse, next to the Ducal Manor in 1986. By the 1990s, and the “advent of modern tourism,” Flath says, “the municipal government entered into a tortuous and convoluted process of trying to reinvent Qufu in the image of the modern tourist” (183). “Anything that might interfere with tourist comfort” (183) could be eliminated, such as a five-hundred-year-old neighbourhood, demolished in 2013 to make way for hotels, parks, and traditional shopping streets. In consequence, Flath poignantly surmises, “it is not the new structure that looks out of place but rather the old one. And thus develops the compelling need to synchronize the antique with the modern, not through in situ conservation, but by giving the relic a polished façade that reflects on its sponsors as well as the patina of age once reflected on the dukes of Fulfilling the Sage,” Confucius’s most direct descendants (183).
Flath tells the stories of an ancient relic’s battle with time, gravity, and human actions. The complex relationship between his archival sources and the discursive constructions of Kong Temple and its cult practices found in voluminous works by Confucian writers lies outside the scope of this book. Flath makes no claim to write an objective history of the temple of Confucius in Qufu. His history of the physical relic and its environs is an important contribution to our knowledge of Kong Temple and of such sites in general. His judicious use of stele inscriptions and recent archival materials significantly expands the documentary foundation of that knowledge.
Thomas Wilson
Hamilton College, Clinton, USA
pp. 153-155