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.
The capital: nine li square, three gates a side, nine roads each way
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)
The passage is only a few dozen characters long, and every word has been argued over. The usual reading, followed in the model, takes the nine roads each way as three through each of the three gates. A Zhou li was about 300 paces, roughly 400 m, making the ideal city some 3.7 km square, a size the great imperial capitals far exceeded.
The model is an editorial reconstruction in the tradition of the diagrams drawn by commentators from the Song onward; heights are exaggerated.
Related rules
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.
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, “The capital: nine li square, three gates a side, nine roads each way”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/kaogongji-city. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.