Landscape Study On Traditional Qiang People’s Tribes In Northwest Sichuan Province

Living in groups is the basic way for human to exist and develop, while settlement is the basic spacial form to realize living together. Settlement integrates every aspect of culture and life, including clustering and clustering-related environmental context concerning life and production. After long-term producing and living in the nature, a rough, natural but special landscape culture has been formed.With a long history, Qiang people has played an important role in China’s multicultural context. Their tribes are formed by architecture and settlement environment, and academic circle pays more attention to the tribes’aboriginal architecture than their landscape. The landscape of tribes has represented a harmonious and ecological settlement, which has became a cultural landscape resulted in their way of transforming nature for living and production. Their tribes’landscape has reached an overall coordination in economy and nature, so it has become a inseparable part of studies on Qiang tribes. At the same time, tourist industry’s surging up crushed Qiang tribes’urbanization, leading to the opening-up in society and changes in traditional economical structure. Faced up with the challenges from modern civilization, Qiang tribes’behavior culture, material culture and spiritual culture are dying down generally. Leap-forward updating, developing, adapting to the development, keeping sound regional landscape and structure as well as keeping benign Eco-development are issues need to be solved critically and urgently.Based on Prof. Ji Fuzhen’s research on tribes of Qiang people in Northwest Sichuan, this thesis selected three typical site selections to study, including site selection in valley, hillside and high hillside. And according to the inside layout, four typical tribes that formed into three kinds of layouts have been selected for study, including watchtower-centered, canal-centered and rode-arcade-centered. After field research and test, combining with local document analysis, this thesis has given an thorough and deepened analysis on the tribes of Qiang people, and finally put forward accordingly protection measures.Four typical tribes are studied from material perspective, from general Eco-environment context to site selection, then stretch to the inside landscape structure, and finally detailed to inside courtyard and node landscape. Firstly, this thesis studies external factors affecting site selection, such as land acreage, altitude and water resource. Then, it goes to tribes, categorizing them into functional and structural landscape. The last part analyzes landscape nodes and inhabitants’courtyards from tribes ally perspective. Final strategies on the Eco-landscape planning of Qiang tribes will help establish a highly-balanced scenario between human and environment, history and reality, cultural inheritance and economical development.This thesis consists of six parts:first chapter introduces general research background, purposes and significance, also it presents research object, contents and research methods. Related concepts and research status in and out of China will be clarified so as to found a solid theoretical basis for later research.Second chapter is an overall introduction of the Eco-environment and site selection of Qiang tribes. Eco-environment landscape study will show how nature and human affect site selections. Eco-environment refers to the habitation background for human to exist, including environment, resource and ecology.The third part is an overall statement of Qiang tribes’landscape. It conducts a categorical research on layout forms and landscape usages, based on the influences of which to study tribes’layout, and ascertain each landscape’s structural function and the way they meet with military, production and living needs.The fourth part is a case study on typical Qiang tribes in Northwest Sichuan (Muka village and Taopin village in Lixian county, Buwa village in Wen Chuan county, Napu village in Maoxian county). This case study starts from village site selection to the interrelationship between outside landscape and inside landscape, and finally stretches to the detailed study on node landscape and courtyard landscape.The fifth part is a general analysis on the case study done in the previous chapter. From site selection and outside landscape study, to spacial layout and landscape structure study, this chapter finally conducts a general summary of node landscape, water networks landscape and rode landscape. Unique ethnic features can be drawn out from different case study; and features of different landscape influenced by different site selections are also get summarized.The last chapter proposed strategies on Qiang tribes’protection, i.e. ways to restore geographical characteristics both in environment and culture, and also go well with sustainable development.