Taiwan Today

Modernization and urbanization have not been kind to old buildings as traditional structures are much less economical in their use of land than high-rises. The destruction of these old buildings, however, has created a great loss in one of the areas of achievement in Chinese culture. For more than two decades, Peng Kuan-lin has been trying to rekindle part of this architectural heritage in miniature.

Born in 1956 in Yangmei, Taoyuan County, Peng was apprenticed to a carpenter after graduating from junior high school and then worked for different factories making all kinds of wooden products from furniture to handicrafts. He explains that at the time, almost all these factories were making good profits in the export market. "Coffins are probably the only thing I haven't made," Peng says. "I was picking up different carpentry and business skills, thinking that maybe I'd someday start my own factory."

Peng did start his own business later on, making wooden dollhouse furniture for export. Business was good in the first several years but went downhill just after he had invested more capital in machines and when China, with much lower production costs, became the dominant supplier in the market. Peng went broke and ended up with a pile of machines that had no resale value.

Reduced Circumstances

Having nothing to do for quite a while, he dug out some books on Western scale-model miniature houses a customer gave him when he was in the trade and began to build one. Although he knew next to nothing about Western architecture, Peng completed a three-story, six-room Victorian style house with furniture, lights and everything equipped in four months. "That one was for killing time since basically I didn't have a life then," he says. "Then when I saw the cities were full of Western skyscrapers, I began to wonder if it would be possible to recreate the unique qualities of Chinese architecture that was fading from our cityscapes."

Hoping that his work might help revive interest in traditional Chinese architecture was only part of the reason for Peng's decision to concentrate on building miniature structures. Another strong motivation was that he wanted to protect his investment in those machines. "I didn't want to leave them there to rust, so I leapt on a tiger and couldn't get off," he says. "And since there wasn't anything similar in the market, it seemed like an opportunity for a profitable business." Having only completed a Western doll-house, Peng had a lot to learn about Chinese architecture.

After some research, he decided that pavilions would be a good place to start, since they only consist of a base, a roof and columns, and are the smallest and simplest structure in Chinese architecture. "It was easier for me to prepare drawings to use as blueprints," Peng says. "And I was thinking that they would probably be easier to sell since they take up less space to display." For the first year, however, Peng failed with every pavilion he tried to design. When he finally completed his first piece, he felt that it left much to be desired. He attributed his dissatisfaction to a lack of detailed drawings to work from, very few intact examples from which to model and a scarcity of reference materials. In fact, many reference materials or drawings of architectural structures on specific buildings could be found in China, but Peng had no access to them due to cross-strait political realities at the time.

The paintings and illustrations available in Taiwan offered only incomplete guides. Fortunately, Peng realized that almost all Chinese architecture adheres rigidly to symmetry, so even though a picture may show just a fraction of a building, he could usually guess what the rest of it looked like. As to the size of structures, Peng says that doors, balustrades and chairs in classical buildings are made to fixed heights. For example, the stools used in pavilions are about 50 centimeters high, so it is safe to extrapolate the size of the rest of the structure from a stool in a picture. The guessing and extrapolation, though, is no longer needed since access to Chinese reference materials is no longer a problem.

Proportional Representation

Following the Western scale for miniature houses, Peng makes his pieces exactly one-twelfth the original size. He uses red sandalwood, once known as a material for making furniture for imperial use. The wood is hard, resistant to termites and rotting and very expensive--something like US$20 for one twelfth of a cubic foot. Money, however, is not always the issue; supply has been short since Vietnam, the main supplier, banned the logging of red sandalwood. Peng stockpiled some when he had the chance and thinks it will last him for some time.

The construction of a miniature is just like that of a real house, but techniques vary due to the size difference. Many parts of the miniatures, for example, are glued together instead of using the mortise-and-tenon technique. The difference in method, however, makes no difference to viewers since the finished buildings look the same. To make his pieces even more "real," Peng specially orders pottery figures from China to go with them.

As Peng sees it, the most difficult part of traditional buildings is the roof. He explains that the earliest structures had square roofs because they were the easiest to build. As the skills of architects improved over time, more complicated roof designs came into being; triangular, pentagonal, hexagonal, octagonal and even fan- and plum blossom-shaped roofs appeared. To add to the complexity, many of the roofs were designed with double or triple eaves. "Western roofs for scale models are mostly simple composites of flat parts, but Chinese roofs are more complicated, particularly with eaves that curve upward," he says. "Ask any carpenter, they tell you that bending a piece of wood to a desired curve is the most difficult skill in the trade." For dramatic curvature, which red sandalwood will not tolerate, he sometimes needs to glue several pieces of wood together, and skillfully makes it look seamless.

The actual building time for the simplest models is between one and two months, but most of the works take much longer. One that took an unusual amount of time is the Wanchun Pavilion. Built in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and reconstructed in the Qing (1644-1912), the pavilion stands in the gardens of the Forbidden City in Beijing. Different from most Peng's other works, this one is "baseless" so that visitors can walk underneath it and look up into the complex ceiling structure. It took Peng six months to construct the Wanchun Pavilion, but his reproduction of the Lian Shan Shuang Lin Monastery, a national monument in Singapore, took even longer. This is Peng's only reproduction at a scale of 1:20, but it is his largest piece. With all its halls, towers and walls together, the miniature monastery is 13 meters long and 3 meters wide and took Peng five years and many trips to Singapore to make two sets--one in the monastery and the other in Peng's studio.

Housework Never Ends

Since 1984, 16-hour workdays and a seven-day-a-week schedule have been the norm for Peng. "I was so like a hermit that even my family refrained from visiting or phoning me, and I didn't go home for three consecutive lunar new years," he says. "My family thought I was obsessed and I probably was." His diligence paid off in 1988 when he had his first solo exhibition at the Taiwan Provincial Museum (the National Taiwan Museum since 1999), where 20 pavilions were showcased. The exhibition, originally scheduled for 30 days, was so popular that it was extended for another 30. In the following two years, Peng was invited to hold exhibitions by cultural centers in Taoyuan, Keelung, Tainan and Miaoli. The exposure earned him high praise among Chinese architecture enthusiasts such as Lee Chian-lang, a leading scholar in Chinese architecture. Lee was later contracted as an advisor to the restoration of the Shuang Lin Monastery and recommended Peng for the miniature project. Peng himself, however, is not so enthusiastic about holding exhibitions, since moving his work from one place to another is a logistical project that involves a crane and a cargo container, and is thus a "major headache" for him.

In addition to fans of traditional architecture, the shows attracted interested buyers as well. Selling reproductions of his works became Peng's primary source of income. Peng set his price for a single structure at between NT$30,000 and $300,000 (US$900 and $9,000). Given the cost of the red sandalwood, the capital invested in machinery and the time needed to complete pieces, even the backorders and the help of his younger brother and a few hired hands could not fatten his profit margin. "Working 24/7, I make no more than an average carpenter on NT$2,000 (US$60) a day," says Peng.

The good days lasted for about a decade until the turn of the century. Peng thinks that although the economic slowdown had some influence, the main reason for the tapering off of his business was the small number of miniature building enthusiasts in Taiwan. In the hope of expanding his customer base a little, he opened his workshop to the public in 2000, so visitors can appreciate the 50 pieces he has completed. Most of the buildings these miniatures represent are in China, with just a few in Taiwan, such as the Shanmen Pavilion at Lungshan Temple in Lugang, Changhua County and the Jingfu Gate, the eastern gate of old Taipei City.

Peng's gallery in Yangmei was listed by the Taoyuan County as a must-see site. The result, however, was not as expected. "I had 500 visitors a day, no time to work, and didn't make a single sale," he says. "People liked what they saw, but were scared off as soon as they heard the price." After about a year, Peng shut the door to walk-in visitors and only receives groups with a reservation. To feed himself, Peng makes tables for deity statues or ancestral tablets, though business has not been good due to competition from cheap factory products.

Peng is a little frustrated about the financial difficulties that have kept him from realizing many of his projects. "If I had the money, I could have put mini-cams inside the miniatures so that people could see the interiors," he says, then takes out a photocopy of a painting of a Han (206BC-219AD) palace. "The actual scene is long gone," he explains, "but I'm going to recreate it someday, my way." The obsession, obviously, remains unchanged.

Write to Jim Hwang at jim@mail.gio.gov.tw