Research Of Chinese Ancient Urban Mrphologies Based On Climate Adaptability

Ancient Chinese cities have a history of thousands of years. Different historical dynasties recorded different urban planning philosophy. Many of these ancient practices on urban planning and design can be used for reference are by today's urban planning. A study of the climate adaptability of ancient Chinese urban form is theoretically significant. It helps to guide the modern city design, to create and build a modern city with Chinese characteristics and to inherit and carry forward the local traditional culture. Moreover, such as study can make up for lack of acknowledge in ancient city construction history.The current researches in ancient Chinese urban form mainly focus on historical geography, archeology and architecture. Morphology of ancient Chinese cities, considering the object, can be divided into three levels:a research in the individual case of urban morphology; a research in type, region and urban form in different historical periods; a comprehensive study of Ancient Chinese urban morphology from a macro perspective. Most scholars lay particular stress on city history while lack research in climate adaptation of ancient urban form.Feng Shui is the ancient Chinese theory on environment selection. It is reasonable both in ecological and climatic point of view, especially when it is applied in site selection and layout design. An urban site selection guided by Feng Shui is of simple dialectic view and harmonious concept of nature. Through investigation and study, the author thinks the main reason for the emphasis on riding north to south is to take in more sunshine and 'Negative Yin embrace Yang'is to avoid the local climate's evils and using its benefits.For an in-depth analysis of the climate rationality of ancient city site, this author applied gloss method and other research methods to investigate and analyze a great deal of history documents. When they began to select a city site, one prior consideration is climate features, such as sunshine, ventilation, to figure out their influence on the city's later development.'Fronting water and with hills on the back'is originally about city's climate adaptability, which is gradually sublimed to the social hierarchy, Reiji order and other features in "Zhou Li". Later, the rite of the Western Zhou Dynasty was broken and the orientation is more flexible in accordance with climate and topography. As for the research in ancient city water system for climate adaptability, the paper precisely analyzes the natural and artificial river channel combination in the Northern Wei Ye City, Sui and Tang Chang'an and Luoyang City. It also includes some other case studies such as the excavated water system in Suzhou. It analyzes the positive role that water system played in urban climate adaption.In order to study the climate adaptability of layout of the ancient city, the author examined a large number of cases and detected that the early urban planners clearly took the dominant wind direction into consideration when they designed the city layout. And elements of many ancient cities have urban climate adaptability.The paper ended with a conclusion on the climate rationality of feng shui theory as well as site selection, urban water system and city layout based on climate adaptability. It tries to systemize ancient Chinese urban form based on climate adaptabilityn from a new perspective.