The Impounding Lake System Of China And Its Relationship With Ancient Cities

Ancient Chinese cities are compound spaces carrying interactive development process between mankind and the natural system,and the construction of ancient water conservancy works provides basic environmental services and residential security for the urban locality.The impounding lake system(ILS)is a prominent environmental support system artificially constructed for a city and its periphery to retain and store water sources.Its comprehensive utilization has enabled many ancient cities to integrate mountain and water features and form poetic scenic landscape systems.From the perspective of discipline of landscape architecture,the paper attempts to construct the theoretical framework and connotative system of ILS and establish ILS linkages with ancient cities.Firstly,by sorting out the ancient and modern concepts,the basic content and systemic features concerning impounding lake,the objects and categories for the research are delineated.And the historical stages and development characteristics of the construction of ILS in China from ancient times to the Ming and Qing Dynasties are thereafter collated.Then,the paper investigates the distribution features as well as the structural paradigms,constituent units and spatial types of ILS on Chinese territorial lands were studied.Based on the above,the research analyses the close supporting relationship of the ancient ILS to the city,and its symbiotic spatial relations and structural paradigms.With typical cases selected for longitudinal explorative study,the paper focuses on discussion in the three aspects:1)How does ILS fit physically and typographically into the city landscape base?2)What is the relationship between ISL and the urban development sequence?3)What are the spatial characteristics and landscape style and features framed by the comprehensive system function?In addition,the paper expounds the landscape characteristics,artificial management system and art-up expression of ISLs through studying ancient literatures.Finally,the contemporary value carrier and sustainable development pathways of the ancient Chinese ISLs are extracted.This study probes into available testable documents through field survey and explorative analysis of ancient texts,territorial maps and landscape drawings.Spatial analysis and geographical modelling were conducted by inferring to the historical spaces and analysis of their changes.Integral systematic,phenomenological and typological methodologies are employed to construct the framework and theoretical systems of ILS.The main conclusions of the study are as follows:1)Impounding lake as important water conservancy works in human habitat construction of ancient China,is by itself a multi-unit system characterized by specific functions,construction methodologies and structural paradigmatic forms.2)The overall development pathway of ILS of historical China has phased feature and territorial geographical distribution feature of spatial clustering.3)There are spatial affinity and inter-supporting relationship between ILS and the serviced city forming certain spatial structural paradigm forms.4)The ILS landscape of China has recognizable characteristics which help shape the system and style of the site landscape of the ancient city.The innovations of the research are as follows:1)The study for the first time testifies systematically the terminological definition of the impounding lake by sorting out related concepts.2)By building up linkages between ILS and ancient cities for the first time with the study object of ILS and ancient Chinese cities,the ILS time-space-human three-dimensional research framework is constructed and executed.3)By integral use of ancient documents of territorial maps,landscape drawings,literary inscriptions and geospatial information for deductive analysis,the spatial patterns and landscape features of different historical periods of China are speculated.