The Canopy Bed in the Light of Chinese Architecture

By Sarah Handler

Testered bed with alcove Ming period, 17th century `Huanghuali' with painted softwood canopy and platform Height 231 cm, width 219 cm The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Purchase: Nelson Trust) 64-4/4 (Photography by Dick Millard)

Originally, you did not intend to build a house. Unexpectedly you find some spare money, and you start making plans for building a house. From this day on, you need wood, you need stone... From morning till evening people keep whining in your ears. In spite of this the end of the building does not nearly come into view. You have already accepted this as your fate. But then suddenly the house is finished. The walls are washed, the floors swept. The window paper has been glued on, the pictures are put up. All the building workers have left the house, and your own people have come and now sit together, sharing the large bed. Isn't this a great joy? (Jin Shengtan, `Shuo kuai', in Ruitenbeek, p. 82) As an example of joy, the seventeenth century writer Jin Shengtan describes the ordeal of building a new house and the great pleasure - when everything is finished and the workmen gone - of sitting together with his family on the large bed. Jin's lively account reveals significant aspects of the Chinese bed, namely, its use as a daytime seat, its importance in the household and its architectural connections. When the bed, as most large beds were, is a canopy bed, with its own walls and roof, we have a house within the house. The difference between a house and the miniature house is not only size, but also function. In the house we stand on the floor. In the house within the house, we sit, sleep or make love and conceive sons. House and bed enclose, rather than close off, space. Doors allow us to enter the protective space of a house or room; an opening in one side permits us to enter the bed. The concept that space is what makes these structures useful appeared in China before the fourth century BCE in the Dao De Jing.

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel: But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends. We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends. We pierce doors and windows to make a house; And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends. Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the usefulness of what is not. (Arthur Waley, trans., The Way and Its Power: A Study of the Tao Te Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought, New York, 1958, p. 155)

By giving a form to hollow space, a building, room, or bed creates its own universe. This universe is a functional space that is separate yet accessible from the outside. Enclosed spaces exist within enclosed spaces - the bed within a room, the room within the walls of a house, the house within the walls of a city, and the city within the Great Wall of China. Container and contained are related as part of a continuous process of living. The size of the furniture in a room is determined by the dimensions of the architecture, and its placement depends on the configurations of the room, its use, other objects in the space, and aesthetic considerations. As in calligraphy, where the spaces between lines are as important as the lines themselves, the spaces between, around and within a piece of furniture should be functional and visually pleasing. In architecture the demarcation and ordering of space is as important as the construction of walls and roof. Successfully organized space makes the building work as a living environment. As an important entity in design and arrangement, space is replete with meaning. Spatial configurations of architecture and furniture along with size and proportion reflect taste, social rank and wealth. In China, the arts of wooden furniture and architecture are closely related. Both are three-dimensional sculptures that can be admired for their visual beauty. But unlike other art forms they serve as an environment in which we live, and require physical human contact and interaction for them to be an active working part of daily life. You enter a building and move about within it. You go into a canopy bed to sleep, sit on a chair, eat or write on a table, and insert a hand into a cabinet to get a vase. It is only with this physical activity, which is always related to a time and place, that the functional purpose of a building or piece of furniture is realized. When used or when only observed, architecture and furniture live as beautiful objects. Furniture placed within a building helps define the function of its interior space. Among the various types of furniture, the canopy bed is the most architectural. Like a building, the canopy bed provides shelter and protection, shielding the inhabitants from other people, draughts and insects. It has a roof supported by posts and resembles a three-bay building with a wide central bay flanked by smaller bays. As in architecture, the posts provide the structural support while the railings between are infilling, like curtain walls. It is instructive to compare a canopy bed to the facade of a typical hall in the Liu Garden in Suzhou (Figs 1 and 2). Both have supporting frameworks of wood - the finest huanghuali for the bed and a softer, less expensive wood for the building. The front of the building, like the bed, is open, with only low railings separating interior and exterior space. In this type of building the roof is supported by a post-and-beam wooden framework and the walls are non-load-bearing. The space between columns of a building or the posts of a bed is left open, or filled, entirely or in part, with various kinds of solid or openwork walls. The way in which bedposts rest on separate flared pieces of wood is analogous to the stone bases on which the columns of the hall stand. In the building, the column bases rest on a rammed-earth foundation. Since the columns are not anchored by ground sills that tie them together, in earthquakes they move with, rather than against, the tremors, thus preserving the framework of the building. On the bed, however, the posts are tied together by the frame of the seat on which they stand. The bed has a rigid frame that can withstand the weight and stresses of people sitting, sleeping and moving on its seat. As Jin Feng has pointed out, the rigid frame of furniture and the flexible frame of architecture is an important difference between the two arts. The flexibility of furniture construction lies not in its frame but in the floating panels (on table tops, cabinets and chair seats) which allow for the expansion and contraction of wood with changes in humidity, thereby preventing warping. Both furniture and architecture are assembled from standard modular parts, instead of being constructed using building materials. Architectural framework and furniture are held together primarily with mortise-and-tenon joinery, occasionally with wood pins for additional strength, rather than glue or nails. Both employ many of the same joints, but those in furniture are often more complex and refined. Dismantling a bed for easy transport and storage is comparatively simple and quick - only twenty minutes for the large alcove bed in Figure 11. A building can also be dismantled and installed elsewhere: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts was able to bring the early seventeenth century Wu family reception hall and the 1797 Studio of Gratifying Discourse from the Dongting Hills near Suzhou and set them up in the museum to display their collection of Chinese furniture (Fig. 3). The Chinese distinguish between `large carpentry' (da muzuo) which is the structural wooden framework, and `small carpentry' (xiao muzuo), which includes all non-structural elements, such as partitions, doors, windows, railings and furniture. In the early seventeenth century, Zhou Hui in his Jinling suoshi (Details of Nanjing) described a certain Liu Jingzhi as a `skilled hand in small wood' (Nancy Berliner, Beyond the Screen: Chinese Furniture of the 16th and 17th Centuries, Boston, 1996, p. 127, n. 3). He might have specialized in furniture or interior fittings, or been skilled in both. It is therefore not surprising to find multiple similarities between furniture and the non-structural woodwork in architecture. The openwork panels at the top of the posts of the canopy bed in Figure 1 are within hanging-column framing, as are the decorative panels above the entrance to the hall in the Liu Garden. Below, lattice railings on either side of the entrance span the space between the posts in both bed and hall. The railings are separate panels, tenoned to mortises in the posts, with intricate lattice designs formed by joining small curved or straight pieces of wood. The lattice on the bed has a curved cloud-head pattern, while those in the hall have a straight geometric pattern on either side of carved openwork plaques. Beneath the canopy of the bed are small openwork panels resembling the ventilation panels underneath the eaves of the Wu family reception hall (see Fig. 3). The three panels on the front of the bed are decorated with representations of Taihu rocks among scrolling plum blossoms, magnolia flowers and peaches with their blossoms. Slanting wanzi patterns (resembling backward swastikas but meaning `ten thousand' and conveying wishes for immortality and abundance) adorn the panels on the side of the bed, and those along the back contain rope-and-cloud-head designs. The ventilation panels in the reception hall have simple geometric patterns, but other buildings have more complex designs like those on the side and back of the bed. The space between the posts may be treated in various ways. The front of the Wu reception hall is completely enclosed, unlike the open Liu Garden hall. The central bay is fitted with tall wooden doors and the smaller side bays have windows above a solid wall faced with ceramic tiles. Following the custom of the Suzhou region, windows and doors are fitted with removable winter windows consisting of bamboo frames inset with small square seashell panes, which, when illuminated by the sunlight, brighten the interior and display the natural patterns on their surface. Each door and window consists of a single outward-opening panel pivoting on an extension of its frame that fits into sockets above and below. The construction allows them to be partially or fully opened, or entirely removed in hot weather. This is just one example of the many ways in which a non-supporting wall may be designed. Folding screens are seen in canopy beds in early depictions, such as Tang dynasty (618-906) illustrations of the Vimalakirti Sutra at Dunhuang and the Admonitions Scroll (see Handler, p. 144, fig. 10.4, and Shane McCausland, `The Admonitions Scroll: Ideals of Etiquette, Art and Empire from Early China', in Orientations, June 2001, p. 22, fig. 1). Solid wood panels appear in a seventeenth century woodblock illustration to The Life of Han Xiangzi (see Handler, p. 154, fig. 10.13). Most extant canopy beds have low railings with lattice or carved openwork panels. The canopy bed with dragon motifs in Figure 4 is an example of the latter. Each panel is carved from a single piece of wood, and the railing has intricate patterns of running, twisting and coiled dragons. Openwork and lattice-work provide partial privacy - separating, yet allowing fragmented vision and the circulation of light and air. In the centre of the railings flanking the entrance to the bed are large roundels containing the characters fu (`good fortune'), on the right, and shou (`long life') on the left - bringing these good wishes to those within the bed like good-luck couplets or characters flanking the entrance to a Chinese house (Fig. 5). Another character frequently used in architectural and furniture decoration is wan (`ten thousand'), which is embedded in the pattern of the lattices forming the railings of the alcove bed in Figure 11 and on the decorative panel within hanging-column framing above the entrance to the Liu Garden hall (see Fig. 2). Furniture and architecture share a common decorative vocabulary, and there are many examples of their common use of the same motif. At the top of the railing of the canopy bed in Figure 4 is an open panel with decorative struts in the form of a flower within a begonia-shaped frame. Similar struts are found on the railings of the Liu Garden hall. The struts on the waist of the bed are carved to resemble bamboo. Functional as well as decorative, struts separate and support two parallel horizontal elements. Decorated struts are also used in `large carpentry' between beams. In the interior of an ancestral hall in Tangyue village (Huizhou district, Anhui province) we see struts with cloud-head motifs between the curved moon-beams and the upper beams (Fig. 6). The sculpted moon-beams (named because of the incised crescent moon shape that continues the line of the supporting bracket) are carved from a large piece of wood just like the curved cabriole legs on the bed. The curved wooden members in Chinese architecture and furniture are created by carving rather than steaming and bending. In wooden buildings, the roof beams are usually exposed and often embellished with carved ornamentation. Frequently the structural framing is also clearly visible, partially embedded in a white wall so that it creates a pleasing pattern. As on wooden furniture where the joinery is often visible, this results in an integration of form and structure. The designs on lattice and openwork panels in furniture and architecture become stunning decorative patterns against a silk or paper background. In a painting illustrating a scene from Jin ping mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase), the cloud motifs on the lattice of the bed, fashioned from speckled bamboo instead of huanghuali, stand out against the silk bed-curtains (Fig. 7). Whether you look at the bamboo form or the spaces between them, the lattice has great visual appeal. In architecture, a similar effect is created by the semi-transparent paper pasted over the inside of windows and door lattices. The paper is pasted up at the beginning of each new year, and punctured as the days became warmer to increase air circulation (Fig. 8). In wealthy households, silk gauze instead of paper was pasted over the windows. The gauze had to be frequently replaced, and the colour was carefully selected in relation to the view outside. In the eighteenth century novel Shitou ji (The Story of the Stone), Grandmother Jia draws Lady Wang's attention to the faded gauze in Daiyu's windows:

`This kind of gauze looks very well on a window when it's new,' she said, `but after a while it loses its greenness. Green isn't a suitable colour for the windows here in any case. There are no peach or apricot trees outside to make a contrast when they are in flower, and there is already enough green in all those bamboos. I seem to remember that we used to have four or five different shades of window gauze somewhere or other. You must look some out tomorrow for her and have this changed.'

Xifeng remarks that in the silk store she saw some beautiful rose-coloured gauze. This Grandmother Jia explains is `haze diaphene' which:

`... used to come in four colours: "clear-sky blue", "russet green", "pine green" and "old rose". Hung up as bed-curtains or pasted in windows it looks from a distance like a coloured haze. That's why they called it "haze diaphene". The old rose kind is sometimes called "afterglow". You won't find fabric made as fine or as soft as that nowadays, not even among the gauzes made for the Imperial Household...When we first had it, we used it only for covering windows with, but later on we began experimenting and found that it made very good quilts and bed-curtains as well. Get a few lengths of it out tomorrow. You can use the "old rose" kind to re-cover these windows with...if you find the "clear-sky blue"...I should like two lengths myself for a set of bed-hangings; and any left over can be matched with suitable lining-material and made up into waistcoats for the girls...' (Cao, vol. 2, pp. 282-84)

Sometimes the silk gauze bed-hangings were embroidered. Those on Tanchun's bed, which had `a pattern of bright green plants and insects in reversible embroidery', were so realistically done that the young Ban'er ran over to it and began identifying the insects: `That's a cricket. That's a grasshopper...'(ibid., p. 293). Other fabrics used for bed-curtains, according to the connoisseur Wen Zhenheng (1585-1645), included: pongee silk or thick cotton with purple patterns for winter, paper, spun silk, brocade, banana fibre, patterned towelling, and silk decorated with ink painting of plum blossoms (Wen Zhenheng, Zhang wu zhi jiao zhu, Nanjing, 1984, p. 333) (Fig. 9). For greater privacy, a blind is hung on the bed between the frame and silk curtain. Blinds were also suspended between the outer pillars of a building when the doors and windows were removed for the summer. A blue blind hangs on the canopy bed and a bamboo one between the pillars of the building in Figure 7. A colourful eighteenth century bamboo blind in The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a pillar-span wide and has stylized floral decoration, silk binding along the sides and painted wood along the top and bottom.In The Story of the Stone, when preparations are being made for the Imperial Concubine's visit, hundreds of blinds are ordered for the garden buildings, including ones made of speckled bamboo, red-lacquered bamboo with gold flecks, black-lacquered bamboo, coloured net, and red felt. They also ordered 120 `curtains, large and small, in various silks and satins - flowered, dragon-spot, sprigged, tapestry, panelled, ink-splash' (Cao, vol. 1, p. 333). Curtains are hung in windows, doorways and on canopy beds. Sometime a valance is hung along the top of the curtains. In Figure 9, the valances in both window and bed parallel each other beautifully in form and function. Here the bed is furnished with a thin mattress covered in a colourful fabric, and with a pillow and silk-covered quilt. In hot weather it has a cool bamboo mat. When perfumed balls, censers or flowers are hung within the curtains, a fragrant refuge is created. During the day, the curtains are held open by decorated metal hooks attached to knotted silk cords, and one can place a small table on the bed or a large table in front of it, to make the bed into a convenient daytime seat (see Fig. 7). The private world within the bed is open to the room, and interior and exterior space become one continuous living environment. Similarly, in Chinese architecture there is always considerable merging of indoor and outdoor space. In courtyard houses every room opens onto a courtyard, and to go from apartment to apartment, courtyard to courtyard, it is necessary to go outside along covered verandahs and walkways. The furniture is often moved from inside out to the verandah or garden. Facades of buildings frequently consist largely or entirely of windows and doors that can be completely opened or removed. Some garden buildings, such as one in Gazing Garden (Zhanyuan) in Nanjing, have wooden lattice windows on all sides so that in the heat of summer the structure becomes an open pavilion (Fig. 10). Wooden balustrades known as `beautiful lady balustrades' (meiren lan) convert the window sills into benches. Sitting on the balustrade or one of the stools on the verandah, one can enjoy fresh air and the garden while talking with someone inside the room. When the hall in Gazing Garden is compared to the grandest of Chinese beds, the alcove bed, the connection between furniture and architecture is particularly striking (Fig. 11). The bed stands on a wooden platform and the hall on a rammed earth platform faced with stone. On the front of the bed there is an alcove resembling a verandah with railings between the outer columns. The alcove, furnished with stools and a footstool, is a place to sit and converse with someone on the bed or in the room outside. At night the bed-curtains may be lowered to create a private space, just as the doors and windows of the building may be closed to exclude the outside world. This alcove bed was a woman's treasured possession, a sign of her status within the household as well as the wealth of the family. The bed was the central piece of furniture in a bride's dowry. Although the bride was concealed in a sedan chair, the bed was paraded through the streets for all to see. A husband might present his favourite wife with a new bed, and wives vied with each other for the finest bed. The bed has great symbolic meaning as the place where sons are conceived, who will carry on the important rituals before the ancestors' soul tablets. Each tablet is inscribed with the ancestor's name and kept in a household shrine. Souls of ancestors reside in these tablets and have the power to bring good fortune or disaster upon living descendants. Therefore they must be supplied with offerings and be told in detail about major family events, such as marriage, death and the birth of a son. Ancestor tablets are placed in household shrines that are often beautiful miniature three-bay buildings (Nancy Berliner and Sarah Handler, Friends of the House: Furniture from China's Towns and Villages, Salem, 1995, p. 112). The Lu Ban jing (Classic of Lu Ban), the fifteenth century carpenter's manual, gives detailed instructions for building a shrine that is a tripartite structure consisting of columns, canopy and altar table. References to favourable measurements determined by cosmological considerations, a major part of the architectural discussions, are only found in the sections on the shrine and on the alcove bed (Ruitenbeek, pp. 89 and 226-27). Architecture, bed and shrine clearly have a special relationship. The Lu Ban Jing tells us that it is necessary to select favourable days for each step in the construction of a building. In the instructions for building furniture, it is only in reference to beds that favourable days are given to place the bed and hang the bed-curtains. Chinese architecture and the canopy bed are brothers or sisters, sharing identical or similar forms, proportions, materials and aesthetic. Each one contains and pleases, and they share the same spirit. They share a modular birth, and components of one are found in the other. Of course, they vary in size and function, but in their working life they create space, filled and hollow, and operate as splendid elements for a living society. Given the stunning traditions of Chinese architecture and canopy beds, beyond their primal necessity of sheltering, containing and bringing comfort to our lives, they offer a grand gift accompanying their pleasant usefulness: the presence of art objects.