Beijing Courtyard house (B)
From a satelliite view of Hutong, some of the courtyard houses can still be recognized and well preserved, many others are just invisible among the little extension buildings.
As I just mentioned, the courtyard with 3 layers was for rich family, while normal family will have smaller ones, here are some examples.
A two yard house
A courtyard house with front yard and middle yard is called a 2-layer-courtyard. It is smaller in size, most of the case, there is no corridor to connect the houses, and the second gate in the middle is simple, not very much decorated, this type of house is suit to a business man, without many servants. But in today’s standard, it is still much too big in size.
An one yard house
For most of the houses in the Hutong, for average family, a courtyard would be like this way, just a square shaped yard, everything concentrated into just one yard. That is 80% of the cases you will see, if you have a chance to visit a courtyard. Even a courtyard at this size has to house at least 4 families from 1900s, as the Beijing population boomed, today sometime the number of families is even more than this, every family will build an extension just outside their room.
There were a very detailed stipulation on the size, design and building materials of the courtyard house from the Ming Dyansty, for example, the color of courtyard house was to be painted into grey color, the use of expensive timber was forbidden.
Main Room
The level of a house could be classified not only on the location or size (best location in the east or west of the Fobidden City), but also from the design of the Main Room. The main room, normally is the best room in the whole complex, peole would like to build it 3 units in the middle (pillar to pillar) and 2 ear-rooms, and sometimes in case of space limitatiom, even they would skip the plan of the ear-rooms, but the total number of units should make into odd numbers. average family is 3 (shown in the model), very rich family upto 5, prince level the number could be 7, only the Emperor had the priviledge of 9, and in some extreme cases, like the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City and the LingEn Hall at the Changling Tombs, the number is 11.
Orientation of the Buildings
Most of the courtyard are in North and South orientated, preferentially facing to the south, as the house will get more sunshine, and better in the sense of FengShui, while facing to north, some adjustments has to be done to balance. Anyway in a city most of the buildings are in north and south layouted, the city is in grid structure, and a Hutong is to connect a cluster of the entrance of courtyard houses, and by this reason, the Hutongs mostly run from west to east, as you can see from the top satellite image.
Download the PDF file of A Brief Introduction of Beijing Courtyard
