Castle of Vincennes, Paris (1300s AD) In the Middle Ages, many people lived inside castles like this one. You can study pictures of different kinds of medieval castles, and the [...]
Yonglegong Taoist temple in Shangxi (1247 AD) When the Mongols conquered China in the 1200s AD, they did not bring in their own architecture, but continued the older Song Dynasty [...]
Longmen Caves (493-900 AD) By the time of the T'ang Dynasty, in the 600s AD, people were bringing together the Buddhist and Taoist traditions in China to create a new unified [...]
Anji Bridge, China (600s AD) Under the Sui Dynasty, in the 600s AD, people in China built this beautiful bridge. The bridge shows the ideas of symmetry and balance that [...]
Goddess Temple, Niuheliang People in China started to build houses instead of living in caves about 5000 BC. That was about five thousand years later than the first houses in Jericho, [...]
Liuhe Pagoda (Hangzhou, 1165 AD) Buddhist pagodas The architecture of the Song Dynasty, beginning in the 900s AD, continued the tradition of Buddhist pagodas. People wanted their pagodas to be [...]
The Shang Dynasty city wall around Zhengzhou (thanks to Gary Todd) There was a city wall of rammed earth around the Shang capital at An-yang, and around other cities like [...]
Song Dynasty pagoda (Hong Kong) About 200 AD, near the end of the Han Dynasty, people in China began to hear about the new religion of Buddhism, which had started in [...]
Hall of Supreme Harmony Forbidden City (Beijing, 1406 AD) - Ming Dynasty Architecture What's the Forbidden City? Early Ming Emperors built Taoist temples to show their power, like the Golden [...]
Early Chinese architecture - A typical Chinese house Chinese houses Most people in ancient China could not afford to live in fancy houses. They lived in small houses made of [...]
