Research On The Evolvement Decoration Style Of The Houses And Buildings In Yangzhou Area During The Ming And Qing Dynasties

Yangzhou has beautiful natural scenery,with the Yangtze River to the south and the Huaihe River to the north.Its unique advantages in water transportation have created the economic prosperity and cultural prosperity of Yangzhou in the ancient times.It has always been a famous transportation hub,business center and cultural city.This unique temperament of Yangzhou is also reflected in the architectural culture of its houses and buildings.The Ming and Qing Dynasties from 1368 to 1911 were the peak of the development of the feudal culture of Chinese civilization,and also the important period of cultural exchanges and collisions between the East and the West.The dredging of the Grand Canal and the implementation of the new salt policy have prompted the formation of the salt merchant group in Yangzhou,so that Yangzhou became the distribution center of the salt industry in areas north and south of the Huai River and the economy flourished again.After experiencing the “destructive ten days of Yangzhou” at the end of the Ming dynasty,the Yangzhou City in the early Qing Dynasty quickly recovered from the city destruction and prospered.The architectural form of the houses and buildings in Yangzhou has a relatively long-lasting development process and becomes mature gradually.Also,regional and cultural characteristics have become increasingly clear.To sort out the houses and buildings in Yangzhou during the Ming and Qing Dynasties and to study the characteristics and evolution of its decoration can not only enrich the regional cultural research system of Chinese architecture and its interior design,but also provides theoretical support for the decoration of the future residential architecture.This thesis takes the example of the houses and buildings in Yangzhou area during the Ming and Qing Dynasties as an example.Based on a large amount of historical data,thispaper conducts research and investigation of the existing remains of the houses and buildings in Yangzhou and deeply analyzes the decoration styles of different stages.Its evolution path is divided into three periods namely from the late Ming Dynasty to the early Qing Dynasty,the middle Qing Dynasty and the late Qing Dynasty.It seeks to explore the background,characteristics and causes of the emergence and development of relevant features.The topic of this thesis is not yet the research scope of mainstream regional research from the perspective of the research object,and the entity objects are also concentrated in the parts of architectural decoration which are easily damaged,lost and ignored.Therefore,this paper hopes to change the situation that the past researches on the architectural culture of Yangzhou mainly concentrated on the architectural design and urban planning at the macro level and the furnishing art at the micro level.From the perspective of architectural decoration culture from the meso-level,the paper collects and sorts out the decoration styles of the houses and buildings in the Ming and Qing Dynasties in Yangzhou,and completely constructs the gene pool of their architectural styles.The evolution rule of the decoration style of houses and buildings in Yangzhou area during the Ming and Qing Dynasties is considered from the point of view of cultural genes.It is also revealed that the Yangzhou area,which is a gathering place for immigrants,does not passively accept foreign cultures from all parties,but actively chooses and creatively transforms and absorbs new factors that are conducive to the development of local culture via people living there.The introduction of the thesis expounds the background,significance and object of the research.,The research content,research ideas and methods are determined according to the deficiencies of the past research and a holistic research framework is established.The main body of the paper is divided into nine chapters.The first chapter makes a brief summary of the background of the formation and development of decoration of the houses and buildings in Yangzhou during the Ming and Qing Dynasties,including the natural environment,social background,local economic characteristics,regional cultural atmosphere,etc.Chapters two to six respectively classify different types of architectural decoration components,and on the basis of a large number of surveys,it combs the evolution characteristics of various types of components of different stages from the Ming dynasty to the Qing dynasty and analyzes their evolutionary paths.Chapters seven to nine analyze the motives of the type transition from the aspects of political economy,cultural formation andsocial atmosphere,and by comparing the architectural culture of the Wu,Hui,and Beijing factions,this paper concludes that in the process of type conversion,it not only has the architectural style of “mixture of the North and South,blend of the Wu and Hui factions”,but also has the architectural decoration of “healthy,suitable and elegant” from the late Ming Dynasty to the early Qing Dynasty,the evolution characteristics of “exquisite,flowery and changeable” in the middle Qing Dynasty and the evolution characteristics of “both complicated and simple,blending between China and Western countries” in the late Qing Dynasty.This paper explains that Yangzhou has inclusive cultural characteristics of its houses and buildings as a north-south material and cultural exchange place and it shows fashionable cultural characteristics as a collision place of Chinese and Western cultures.The final conclusion and outlook summarizes the main innovations and academic contributions.It also expands the direction for follow-up research.