The Guardian of China's Architectural History : Liang Sicheng

Liang Sicheng is known as the Father of Architecture in China. In over 15 years during the 1930s and 1940s, while his country was at war with Japan, he and his wife Lin Huiyin travelled to more than 200 counties in 15 provinces in the Chinese interior and examined 2,738 ancient buildings. Crossing areas with no paved roads, they travelled on foot or by mules and horse carts and slept in temples, village homes or on the ground. Liang was working for the Institute for Research in Chinese Architecture, which made nearly 1,900 detailed drawings of the buildings. The couple continued their work even during the worst years of the Anti-Japanese war, when they were living in miserable conditions in southwest China. Based on these explorations, Liang wrote A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture, a masterpiece published in English and Chinese. He wanted the whole world, Chinese and non-Chinese, to know of these treasures. Chinese architecture has a history of over 4,000 years and its style has been followed in Korea, Japan and Vietnam. As a meticulous scholar, Sicheng wrote dozens of articles and many books, in Chinese and English, to describe his discoveries. In 1946, he founded the faculty of architecture at Tsinghua University in Beijing and had served as its director until his death in 1972.