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.
Land in the capital by rank
Grant residential land in whole blocks and fractions of blocks according to rank: several blocks to the highest ministers, one or two to officials of high rank, and to ordinary households a half, a quarter or less, according to their size.
Minister of the Right 4 machi · high ranks 2 · middle ranks 1 · households 1, ½ or ¼ (691); in Heian-kyō, ordinary lots of 1/32 machi (c. 15 × 30 m)
The decree of 691, made for Fujiwara-kyō, set the principle for every later capital: the grid was a ladder of rank. In Heian-kyō a noble of the third rank or above normally held a whole block, on which he built a shinden-style estate; commoners’ land was divided into thirty-second parts of a block (henushi), each 10 jō east–west by 5 jō north–south, four across the block and eight down it. The houses of commoners stood along the streets on the outer lots, their backs to gardens and vegetable plots in the interior of the block.
In the town, noble estates fill whole blocks in the north-east near the palace; ordinary blocks carry rows of houses on the lots along their streets, fewer in the declining western half.
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)
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.
Set out the posts of a house on a square grid of one ken (six shaku, about 1.82 m) and size rooms, doors, screens and mats to fit the grid.
1 ken = 6 shaku ≈ 1.82 m · 1 tsubo = 1 ken² ≈ 3.3 m² = 2 mats
In the Kyoto system (kyō-ma) fix the mat (6.3 × 3.15 shaku, about 1.91 × 0.955 m) and set the posts outside it; in the Edo system (edo-ma) fix the post grid at 6 shaku and cut the mats to fit between the posts, making them smaller.
kyō-ma ≈ 191 × 95.5 cm · chūkyō-ma ≈ 182 × 91 cm · edo-ma ≈ 176 × 88 cm
Lay the mats of a room so that their joints form T-junctions: no point where the corners of four mats meet, and no continuous seam running straight across the room.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Land in the capital by rank”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/heian-rank-lots. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.