Give a hall an odd number of bays across the front (three, five, seven, nine or eleven) so that the central axis passes through a bay and a doorway, never through a column.
Streets, lanes and south-facing lots
Divide the wards between the main streets with narrow lanes running east–west, and line both sides of each lane with courtyard houses whose main halls face south.
great street 24 bu · small street 12 bu · lanes (hutong) between · lanes c. 70–80 m apart
The Yuan capital Dadu, built from 1267 on the Kaogong ji model, filled its wards with lanes running east–west, so that every lot between two lanes could turn its main hall to the south (Orient by the sun and face the main hall south). A house on the north side of a lane is entered from the south, through a gate in its south-east corner; a house on the south side of the lane is entered from the north, through a gate in the north-west. The gazetteer of Dadu gives the widths of the great and small streets and counts the lanes; the lots themselves were granted in standard sizes when the city was settled.
The town applies this Yuan and Ming–Qing fabric to the ideal plan of the Kaogong ji, as Dadu and Beijing did: its houses stand in rows between east–west lanes, their gates at the corners nearest the lane.
Related rules
Lay out the royal city as a square of nine li on each side, with three gates in each wall and, within, nine roads running north–south and nine east–west, each wide enough for nine chariots abreast.
side = 9 li · 3 gates × 4 sides · 9 jing + 9 wei · road width = 9 gui (tracks)
With the palace at the centre facing south, place the ancestral temple on its left (east) and the altar of soil and grain on its right (west); put the court in front and the market behind, each one fu (a hundred paces) square.
Find true north and south with a plumb-lined post and the shadows of sunrise and sunset, checked by the pole star; then turn the principal hall of every compound to face south.
Pitch a roof no lower than its covering allows (roughly 45° for thatch, 35° for plain tiles, 20–25° for slate, 15–20° for interlocking tiles, a few degrees for sheet metal) and steeper where snow lies long or rain is heavy.
thatch ≥ 45° · plain tile ≥ 35° · slate ≥ 22½° · pantile ≥ 17½° · metal ≥ 5° · membrane ≈ 1–2°
Make the avenues within the city nine chariot-tracks wide, the ring road that runs inside the wall seven tracks, and the roads in the country outside the gates five.
avenue (jing tu) 9 gui · ring road (huan tu) 7 gui · country road (ye tu) 5 gui · 1 gui = 8 chi
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Streets, lanes and south-facing lots”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/dadu-hutong. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.