Mou Family Manor in Xixia
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Moushi Manor, near the city of Yantai, Shandong Province, is the residence for generations of Mou Molin Family, the most wealthy and powerful landlord of Qing Dynasty in north China.
It is the best-preserved and most typical residential complex of landlords of the Qing Dynasty. The manor contains six courtyards, covering an area of 20,000 square meters, with over 480 rooms. All the buildings are colorfully carved and painted with flowers and animals. The patterns of flowers on the lattice windows are vividly carved and painted to the point that birds will be cheated and think them are the real things.
Walls of the manor were built up with river gravels of different colors, which look like the skin of tiger, and these walls are therefore called “tiger walls”. These gravels were so evenly applied, with very thin space in between, that the walls are as smooth as a mirror. Legend goes that coins were inserted in between the gravels in order to fill space between them so as to achieve the smoothness of the whole wall. The most resplendent wall in the complex was made of 386 hexagon-shaped gravels. Each of the 386 gravels matched with pebbles around it forms a flower in hexagon shape. The 386 gravels connected with each other formed a large pattern of hundreds of flowers.
The construction of the manor was an extravagant project, which cost more than 430 thousands tael of silver (tael is a unit of weight used in east Asia, especially in China during ancient time. A tael roughly equals to 1.3 ounces).A comparison will help you better understanding the excess of that project. An average farmer at the same time earned around ten taels of silver for a year’s toil.
When designed their residential buildings, the Moushi Families probably had never imagined that they have created an architectural wonder, which amaze later architects and travelers. The manor has been renowned as “little forbidden city” and “treasure of architectural art” due to its grandeur and large scale.
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