Eastern Han watchtower (an ancient Chinese model, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
What did people build in the Han Dynasty?
By the time of the Han Dynasty, about 200 BC, architects were building all kinds of different buildings including watchtowers, palaces, temples, and store-houses.
Earlier Qin Dynasty architecture
Han Dynasty history
Han Dynasty art
All our ancient China articles
Using baked brick
Architects started to experiment with more complicated roofs, using gables and overhanging eaves. They also started to experiment with building in baked brick during the Han Dynasty – just about the same time as Roman architects were beginning to build in brick at the other end of Eurasia.
What is brick?
Roman architecture in brick
Building Buddhist temples
In the 200s BC, people in China learned about Buddhism, the new religion from India, and so they started to build Buddhist temples for the first time.
Buddhism in China
Indian stupas
These early Han Dynasty Buddhist temples look like Indian temples or stupas from the same time. They are wooden towers.
WHO DIS?
My bio is on this page, under the article.
How do you know this is accurate information!?
Well, I can make mistakes like anybody else. But I have tried hard to make it accurate by reading books and articles about this subject, and looking at objects in museums. Most of the information on this page is also in the books listed in the bibliography, if you want to check. If there’s any particular fact you aren’t convinced about, I’d be happy to answer how I know that.
Or do you mean, how does anybody know this stuff? That’s from reading books that people in China wrote during the Han Dynasty, and from looking at the ruins of the buildings they built back then, and from looking at models of the buildings that archaeologists find in the graves of people who died back then, and at drawings that people did.