Constructing religion: Song dynasty architecture and the Jinci temple complex

This dissertation addresses the buildings within the Jinci temple complex both as a case study in early building style and as evidence for local religious practice. In Part I, I assess the date of the primary temple building at Jinci, the Sage Mother Hall. I do this first by comparing the building to the Northern Song building manual the Yingzao fashi in order to review the current methodology of dating traditional buildings. Then I compare the bracketing style and structural features of the Sage Mother Hall to buildings of similar date in southern Shanxi province. By establishing a stylistic chronology within the southern Shanxi region, I show that the Sage Mother Hall is not a tenth century building, rather it is stylistically from the end of the eleventh century and should be given a date range of 1038–1102. In Part II, I examine the architecture of the temple complex in relation to local religion. The distribution of temple buildings at Jinci reveals both how local people conceived of their divinities, and how over time the temple buildings themselves affected later generations\u27 interpretation of the site. The architectural language of traditional Chinese ritual sites used by elite and common patrons alike reveals aspects of local religious belief systems which were obfuscated by the elite authors of textual sources