Jiren Feng

Although modern architectural historians and sinologists have developed general identifi cations of most textual terms with actual architectural elements, few of them have given attention to the semantic meanings of the terms themselves. When an architectural term was created for a specific building element, the words used in the term had to make sense according to the specifi c architectural procedure and the specific structure related to the element. Th e word choice was a matter of how people (builders or viewers) conceived of these elements. Th erefore, architectural terminology is a faithful carrier of popular architectural culture and distinctive architectural concepts.