The stone architecture of the Qiang

The Qiang that live in the Autonomous Prefecture of Aba, in the province of Sichuan, are possibly, the people indigenous of China with a more particular architecture.

His houses generally are constructed of stone, what gives them a majestic and robust aspect. Some of the houses that today can be observed were already constructed hundreds of years ago. They usually have three apartments and a flat roof. The lowest apartment is used to keep the cattle and the implements of farming, the average apartment is where the persons live and the top apartment is used like granary.

The most important part of the house is, logically, the apartment where the persons live. There the life of the family develops, generally about a fire that, considered sacred, is not allowed to become extinct in the whole year. On him there are a few tripods of metal, of religious meaning for the Qiang. In this apartment there are also the tablets of the ancestors to which the families produce cult in the special holidays. On the roof of every house, a small white stone, an important religious symbol of the Qiang, that in spite of being very widespread, his meaning is unknown. There, in the highest of the house it represents the god of the sky, and it is thought that it can protect to everything what is under her.

The villages Qiang were designed in such a way that the stones houses were turning into an authentic defensive wall, which was remaining hermetically isolated after there closed the narrow alleys that exist between the houses. Close to the villages, out of the same ones, there are usually usually a few big turrets of imposing aspect, sometimes in a small foreland, or where two rivers join.

These turrets must not make a mistake with the stones houses of several apartments. Sometimes is only one turret, and other times there are gathered several. They usually have up to 60 meters high, and rarely they have less than 30. They had apartments constructed with wood, and an interior stairs that was allowing to rise up to the high thing. Although the stones frameworks survive well, the interior wood is in most cases already rotten. His epoch of construction is not known by certainty but the quality of the same one is so good as to have allowed to resist several big earthquakes. Although his function is not clear, it is supposed that they had a defensive character, against the possible hostile invasions.

The teacher Sun Hongkai (1), one of the linguists that more determination has set in unraveling the ethnic labyrinth of this region, makes sure that in the documents of the dynasty They Have already (2.000 years ago) there are described towers of this type, constructed in this region by the ancestors of the Qiang. In the dynasty Tang, the travelers who visit the area also describe a few similar constructions, called "Qionglong" in this epoch, when they differ already perfectly from the housings of the Qiang.

The teacher Sun has verified that all the peoples who speak languages of the branch qiangica, the Jiarong, Pumi, Muya, Ergong, Guiqiong, Namuyi, Shixing, Ersu and Zhaba (unfortunately not recognized until now like differentiated ethnic entities), construct the turrets, while other peoples who, still living in the same region, do not speak language of the branch qiángica, do not construct them.

His linguistic relation, his common architecture, and his cult to the white stone still scantly understood, will allow in the next years to unravel the history and the origin of human communities that for centuries have preserved a particular culture that points at a common origin.

(1) Sun Hongkai. - Shi lun "Qionglong" wenhua yu qiang yu zhi yuyan (On the culture of the towers "Qionglong" and the languages of the branch qiángica). Minzu Yanjiu 1986-2.

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