90
DAVID LUNG
'just growed,' how, or why, no one knows or cares. At some remote and generally unascertainable time in the dim past some families arrived from somewhere else, camped down, made themselves a 'local habitation.' ... and that was the village. It has a street, and perhaps a network of them, but no two are parallel, except by accident, and no one of them is straight. . ."22
There is little doubt that fung-shui has played an important role in the planning of Kam Tin village. The reluctance of Smith and other Western observers alike to accept geomancy as a viable scientific planning principle has rendered their statements inaccurate.
The manifestation of the innermost layer of the Chinese mandala in built forms is the private home. In the farmsteads of Kat Hing Wai, the longitudinal axis penetrates through the enclosed space and open space recapturing the rhythm of light and shadow, gradient intimacy, and fusion of space, time and motion.
The private dwelling, resembling the cosmic diagram of the walled city and the walled empire, focuses inwards. The central courtyard in the house, just as the term t'ien-ching, well of Heaven, implies, is the ceremonial centre for worship vis-à-vis the two roofed areas housing mundane activities of men. The exceedingly narrow lanes and the windowless rear walls reiterate this idiom of privacy. No one from the outside world can tell what goes on behind the blank facades of the row houses, since rich men and poor men live side-by-side. Only the telltale granite slabs in the exterior walls show unostentatiously which house was once occupied by a scholar. Inside the house, the back room is generally more private and is, therefore, used as sleeping area and storage for more personal belongings, while the front room is an undesignated space in which various activities take place according to the purpose and the time of the day. In a way, Kat Hing Wai is more like a large house inside which there are many rooms. The clustering of several walled hamlets together resembles a residential neighbourhood. As Wong Chung-hong points out in "Walled and Moated a Hong Kong Village", the Chinese regard a village, a town or even a nation as just an enlarged family... all were to be built with the same principles in mind."23 Such a strong desire to attain an intimate relationship between man and nature in Chinese cities and villages
90
DAVID LUNG
'just growed,' how, or why, no one knows or cares. At some remote and generally unascertainable time in the dim past some families arrived from somewhere else, camped down, made them- selves a 'local habitation.' ... and that was the village. It has a street, and perhaps a network of them, but no two are parallel, except by accident, and no one of them is straight. . ."22
There is little doubt that fung-shui has played an important role in the planning of Kam Tin village. The reluctance of Smith and other Western observers alike to accept geomancy as a viable scienfitic planning principle has rendered their statements inaccu-
rate.
The manifestation of the innermost layer of the Chinese mandala in built forms is the private home. In the farmsteads of Kat Hing Wai, the longitudinal axis penetrates through the enclosed space and open space recapturing the rhythm of light and shadow, gra- dient intimacy, and fusion of space, time and motion.
The private dwelling, resembling the cosmic diagram of the walled city and the walled empire, focuses inwards. The central courtyard in the house, just as the term f'ien-ching, well of Heaven, implies, is the ceremonial centre for worship vis-à-vis the two roof- ed areas housing mundane activities of men. The exceedingly nar- row lanes and the windowless rear walls reiterate this idiom of privacy. No one from the outside world can tell what goes on behind the blank facades of the row houses, since rich men and poor men live side-by-side. Only the telltale granite slabs in the exterior walls show unostentatiously which house was once occupied by a scholar. Inside the house, the back room is generally more private and is, therefore, used as sleeping area and storage for more personal belongings, while the front room is an undesignated space in which various activities take place according to the purpose and the time of the day. In a way, Kat Hing Wai is more like a large house inside which there are many rooms. The clustering of several walled hamlets together resembles a residential neighbourhood. As Wong Chung-hong points out in "Walled and Moated a Hong Kong Village .. the Chinese regard a village, a town or even a nation as just an enlarged family... all were to be built with the same principles in mind."23 Such a strong desire to attain an intimate relationship between man and nature in Chinese cities and villages
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