01 CHANG CHUN　长春 **
Ji lin sheng　吉林省

GREAT MOSQUE **
清真大寺

It was comparatively late, from the end of the 17th century, that Hui people (Muslims) immigrated into Lianing Province in northeastern China, and no old mosques before the 19th century exist. The most famous mosque in northernmost China is the Great Mosque of Chang Chun, but this city itself, the capital of Jilin Province, developed in the 20th century; the mosque is also a new piece of architecture of the same century regardless of its traditional style.

Japan founded the country of Manchuria in northeastern China and colonized it in 1932, making this town the capital and renamed it Shin-kyo, meaning New City, and constructed many colonial facilities. In the course of its development the number of Hui people increased and a magnificent mosque came to be built there. The current Muslim population is about 30,000 and the mosque has been designated as a Provincial Key Heritage Conservation Unit of Jilin.

In spite of being in an urban district near the Imperial Palace (now a museum), in which the last emperor Puyi lived, the Great Mosque has extensive quiet precincts a good distance from the bustling main street, displaying its richly colored appearance.
Although the Great Mosque was first built in 1862 in this site, it was in the 20th century that it was enlarged to its current scale. Its grand worship hall consists of three joined gabled buildings connected to a front building serving as an entrance hall with a portico under a humpbacked roof. To the rear there is a Mihrab Hall in the form of an unusual three storied tower.
Except its outer brick walls, the worship hall is entirely made of wood and the front timber facade and the rear tower are colorfully painted, mainly in vermilion, the bracket-sets supporting the eaves are particularly brilliant.

 

Contrastingly, its interior is painted modest, mainly in white, without vermilion or red colors. It rather gives a plain impression, displaying a mosque with eccentrically different designs inside and outside.
The most conspicuous part in this mosque must be the tower over the Rear Mihrab Hall. In northern China upper part of the Mihrab is often made open to high ceiling in a form of hexagonal or octagonal cylindrical space on behalf of masonry domed one. Its evolved extremity is this three storied tower in a Chinese-Minaret-like figure. It is difficult to imagine from its external appearance that this symbolic vermilion edifice, a high moon-watching tower on a brick-podium-like ground floor, is solely a Mihrab Hall.
Such unique Mihrab towers are not found in any Islamic architecture in the world other than in China.

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02　SHEN YANG　沈阳 **
Liao ning sheng　辽宁省

SOUTHERN MOSQUE **
清真南寺

   

Although Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning Province, is an old city existing since the Han era, it was after 1296 in the Yuan era that it developed under the new name of Shenyang. It was called Shenjing through the later Jin era and was the capital until the relocation of the capital to Beijing, when the country was renamed Qing.
During Japan’s occupation of Manchuria the city functioned as Japan’s military and economic base under the name of Hou-ten.
Hui people have moved here ever since the 14th century, making Muslim villages called Hui-Hui settlements. Currently about 30,000 Muslims live in the city and their community is said to be intending to form an Islamic financial center in East Asia.

The Southern Mosque, which is located near the old palace of Shenyang (now a museum) from the early Qing dynasty, is said to have been first constructed in 1636 and enlarged in 1927 and again in 1944 to reach its present scale. Its precincts are as extensive as more than seven hectares, so buildings are distributed spaciously with gardens: one goes into the forecourt through the Great Gate, the first courtyard through the second gate, and then the second courtyard in front of the Great Hall behind surrounding walls. All of them are arranged symmetrically on the central axis, with the buildings composed in typical Chinese temple style.
On both sides of the courtyards are lecture halls, the imam’s room, the office of the Islamic Association of Liaoning Province and a school. A women’s mosque was also built in 1999.

The Great Hall designated as a Provincial Key Heritage Conservation Unit of Liaoning, consists of a front building of three-spans in width with a humpbacked roof and a five-spanned worship hall of two joined buildings. In contrast to the Great Mosque of Chanchun, the foremost building is large and gambrel-roofed and the rear is short in depth and gable-roofed, probably as the result of enlargement. Its interior is also divided into two parts with wooden arcad screen. Another difference from the Chanchun mosque is the arched opening of windows on brick walls and more decorative treatment of the interior.

The most conspicuous part in this mosque is also the two storied moon watching tower over the Rear Mihrab Hall, the beams of which are colorfully painted with landscapes. Its most characteristic is not only the independent columns around the walls but also the way they reach to the inside of the ground floor of the Mihrab Hall. Though the projection of the Mihrab Hall backward is a remarkable characteristic of Chinese mosque architecture, this is the only example that has six columns in a circle in its interior.

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03　BEI JING　北京 ***
Municipality of Bei jing　直轄市

NIUJIE MOSQUE ***
牛街礼拝寺
(National Key Heritage Conservation Unit)

This is the most famous mosque in China along with the Huajuexiang Mosque of Xian. The very best example in the capital Beijing, it was often repaired and improved even after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, and it looks as if it were a new edifice in brilliant colors after having been refreshed on the eve of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. As it is also a tourist attraction like Xian’s mosque, its compound is opened to the public and charges an admission fee. Since both have survived unhurt through the Cultural Revolution, in spite of their unfortunate closure for ten years, they are the best remaining heritage to understand Chinese Islamic architecture.

In Beijing there are 200,000 Hui people. In the Niujie district especially 10,000 Hui people live, making it a large Muslim community. ‘Niujie’, literally meaning Ox Street, is the name of the street in front of the mosque that corresponds to ‘Qingzhen Street’, literally Pure and True Street or Hui People’s Street, in most local towns. Around the street Muslims live and a bazaar is formed where Muslim food and goods are sold.
As Muslims were often persecuted, those areas tended to become the poor districts. The Niujie road in Beijing was also that sort of narrow street encircled with poor, run-down houses until the 1980s, but it was widened into a four-lane grand road in the 1990s, clearing slums and destroying traditional courtyard houses. The area is being redeveloped on a large scale into a commercial district with many high-rise buildings.

 

Among more than 60 mosques in Beijing, the Niujie Mosque is the oldest, largest and most opulent. The ground area including the eastern temple section and women’s mosque district attains to 9,200 square meters. However, its location facing west toward the street in front is disadvantageous to show itself as great as it naturally should be in terms of its grand scale. Moreover, the widening of the road brought about the encroachment of the site, with a sidewalk built between the Great Gate and the Zhaobi (mirror wall),which now faces directly onto the carriageway.

It is said that the Niujie Mosque was first constructed in 996, or in 14 during the reign of Tonghe (Liao dynasty), by an envoy from Arabia, Nasrettin. Even if the scale might have been much smaller, it could have been made in the architectural style of the Middle East like the Shengyou Mosque in Quanzhou.
It was reconstructed in 1442, 7 in the reign of Zhengtong (Ming dynasty) and greatly enlarged in 1696, 35 in the reign of Kangxi (Qing dynasty), It now has a Chinese architectural style, but when this style was adopted is unknown.

Although Chinese mosques are generally called ‘Qingzhen Si’ (literally meaning Pure and True Temple) nowadays, it is written in a tablet of the Great Gate that this mosque in Beijing was given the name ‘Libai Si’ (literally Worship Temple) by the emperor Xiansong in 1471, 10 in the reign of Chenghua (Ming dynasty). However, the nomination of Libai Si was rather popular during the Ming dynasty and the difusion of the designation of Qingzhen Si was after the last period of the Ming dynasty.

Plan of Niujie Mosque in Beijing (From " Ancient Chinese Architecture" by Qiu Yulan, 2003, Springer)

As seen in the plan, the disposition of buildings is based on the traditional courtyard style: the mirror wall, a wooden pylon, a moon watching tower, the Great Hall (worship hall), courtyard, Bangke Tower (minaret) and a convention hall, all are lined on the central axis.
While Buddhist and Taoist temples have no restriction with regard to the direction of worship, they always arrange buildings in a line from the Great Gate to the great hall at the furthest end; on the other hand mosques must be oriented to the direction of Macca without exception (to the west in China), so in the case that the front street is on the west side as at the Niujie Mosque, one must approach from the back of the mosque.

In the case of the Huajuexiang Mosque of Xian, visitors advance schematically from the front gate to the inmost worship hall through many courtyards and buildings successively, gaining an intense impression how great the mosque is. In contrast to that, the approach in the Niujie Mosque is quite strange: one enters through a side gate of the wooden pylon (functioning as the Great Gate), advances along the narrow passageway between the wall that surrounds the great hall and ritual washroom, turns left into a cloister where one can see the courtyard obliquely, then turns round to reach the entrance of the Great Hall.
In this way, one does not look at the front façade of each building, nor goes through the Bangke Tower as the second gate, nor experiences the space of courtyard space before worship. The great mosque cannot well display its splendid composition on its extensive precincts of 6,000 square meters. Another arrangement should have been devised for this west-entering site for a mosque.

One more defect in its composition is that the Bangke Tower (minaret) stands in the center of the courtyard. The space between it and the Great Hall only functions as a usual courtyard, being too narrow compared with the great hall’s scale. It might have been the result of the later enlargement of the entrance hall.

 

The Great Hall is not only large-scale, with a capacity for 1,000 people to worship at the same time, but also quite impressive among a great number of Chinese mosques. First of all its brilliant colors, mainly dominated by red, is prominent all over the columns and multilobed arched screens decorated with golden calligraphy and foliage, which subtly divide the hall into plural rows, and moreover the blue-tone beams above.

The existence of these screens, which are called ‘Huanmen’, literally meaning joyous doors, are related to extensions to the hall when plural buildings were connected. Though the lining up of the eaves’ edges might make it difficult to see, the hall consists of two large gabled-buildings of two spans in depth, and three gambrel-roofed buildings of a single span in front, in between and to the rear. The boundary of each of those buildings brought about a line of columns and a screen. Principally Chinese mosques are hypostyle type, but such a great hall with so many partition screens has no equal in the world.

The innermost building, the Rear Mihrab Hall, was added in the Ming era. While in temples of other religions numbers of images are displayed all over the main hall, mosques are characterised by their complete emptiness and it is also heterogeneous in China that the Mihrab is made like an altar and covered with calligraphic citations from the “Koran” instead of enshrinined statues.

The Rear Mihrab Hall has a raised floor with two columns and multi-foiled screens, which enhances the independency of the hall, and is surmounted with an octagonal-cone ceiling carved and painted with meticulous foliage patterns. This Mihrab, looking like nothing other than a gorgeously decorated alter, could be said to deviate from the spirit of Islam, going beyond the function of simply indicating the direction of Macca. This splendid Mihrab Hall could be equated only by the Mesquita of Cordova.

 

To the rear of this hall stands the moon watching tower of also of octagonal plan. In many mosques the moon watching tower functions as a minaret, but this mosque of Beijing has the Bangke Tower (minaret) in the courtyard, which naturally should be located at the road side to fulfil the role of calling neighborhood people to come and worship in the mosque though.
The Bangke Tower surmounted with a gambrel roof was first constructed in 1273. While its predecessor is said to have been a building in which a missionary Arabian dedicated scriptures, the current one is made as a minaret that also served as a second gate, which people may pass through. With a tall second story and outer colonnades set upon a low ground story of brick walls, its overall proportion is not so admirable.

A pair of tablet pavilions on both sides of the courtyard is exceedingly lovely. It can be said that making such elaborate buildings only in order to provide roofs over stone tablets of inscriptions is also a Chinese deviation.

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WEMEN'S MOSQUE * 清真女寺

 

Originally the mosque was a worship place for adult men. Large mosques sometimes provide space for women in the rear or mezzanine, or in a partitioned side space with a curtain. In China however, as the equality of the sexes progressed after the revolution, women’s mosques have been being constructed separate from existing mosques. If the site is extensive enough, it is erected right next to the men’s mosque; if not, it might be erected quite distant; and it can even be built over the men’s in the case of urban-type mosques with narrow grounds.

It is said that there are nowadays more than 20,000 women’s mosques in the whole of China and this number is still increasing. Although an independent women’s mosque usually has a female Ahong (Imam), it does not have one, nor Mihrab or Minbar, if it is attached to a men’s mosque.

At Niujie in Beijing a women’s mosque was constructed in 1925 (year 14 in the Republic of China), obtaining grounds of 1,000 square meters east of the men’s mosque. Despite being a 20th century mosque it was built of wood in the traditional Chinese style in the precincts encircled with brick walls, and was designated as a Provincial Key Heritage Conservation Unit of its Beijing district. After recent complete restoration, it looks new.

In contrast to the Niujie Mosque for men, it has the gate facing east, disposing buildings symmetrically on the central axis from the gate to the Miharab in the west. After the gate there are lecture halls on both sides of the courtyard, and then the three-bay-wide front building of the great hall, which is five bays wide but only a short depth with the Rear Mihrab Hall at the innermost. The roof of each building is humpbacked, supposedly in order to express feminine gentleness. Either side of the Great Hall is a ritual washing room and the like.

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DONGSI MOSQUE ** 东四清真寺

The Dongsi Mosque, so called on account of facing Dongsi South Avenue near the Beijing Palace Museum, was called Dongsi Gate Mosque before the Cultural Revolution. At the time of its first construction it was called Libai Si (Worship Temple) like the Niujie Mosque, but some years later it was renamed Qingzhen Si (Pure and True Temple) and also has the name of Fangming Si. Its ground area is close to 10,000 square meters, larger than that of the Niujie Mosque.
It was first constructed in 1356, at the end of the Yuan dynasty, and reconstructed in 1447, year 12 in the reign of Zhengtong (Ming dynasty) funded by a Muslim military director, Chengyou, in the typical style of the Ming dynasty. It was designated as a Key Heritage Conservation Unit of Beijing, now looking almost new-built through the extensive repairs executed before the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008.

 

Since its front street is on the east side, the Dongsi Mosque takes a straight line composition from east to west, or the direction of Macca. As its precincts are long from front to back like the Xian mosque, they are divided into three successive courtyard sections, giving a dignified impression.
The Great Gate, uncommonly classical for a gate facing an avenue, was reconstructed in this style in 1920. The first courtyard, with no trees, western style buildings on both sides, and lines of modern lighting poles, looks more like a European large street. The next courtyard facing the Great Hall is much more atmospheric, surrounded with galleries with old trees, but the same lighting poles are also incongruous.

The Bangke Tower (minaret) in this courtyard was first erected in 1486 in the Ming Era and reconstructed after suffering a severe damage by an earthquake at the end of the 19th century. Regardless of the resemblance to that of the Niujie Mosque, this tower has a unique cross-gambrel roof. There are lecture halls either side of the courtyard, the three bays wide front hall of the Great Hall in the front, and a library on the rear left.

The hypostyle worship hall of the Great Hall is five spans in width and three spans in depth, all of which are covered with a large single hipped roof. Therefore, it displays an imposing exposed roof structure, and moreover dazzles visitors with its extremely opulent design, which is no less gorgeous than the Niujie Mosque: three chandeliers put accents on the richly colored space based on red and gold. Especially impressive elements are the beams with calligraphy cited from the Koran and green colored foliage decoration above it.

 

On the contrary, the Rear Mihab Hall, behind the openings in the three central bays, has no ornamentation and its walls are totally whitewashed, for this hall only is from the Yuan dynasty or the early Ming, which conveys the style of the Yuan era, entirely made of brick. As it is based on brick arch structure in the same way as the Fenghuang Si (Zengjiao Mosque) of Hangzhou, its ceiling is a dome with corbelled pendentives at four corners, which is called ‘non-beam structure’ in China, and only place painted colorfully is a small circle at the apex of the dome. As the Niujie Mosque is said to have been built in the Song Era, it is older than the Dongsi Mosque. However, architecturally, the Dongsi Mosque has an older western structural system than the Niujie, despite its roof being covered with tiles over the dome.
Since there is not a women’s mosque here, the hypostyle hall of the Tongsi Mosque is partitioned with a screen for the women’s worship space.

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HUASHI MOSQUE * 花市清真寺

 

The Huashi Mosque, facing East Huashi Avenue near Beijing Station, is one of the oldest mosques in Beijing, first constructed in 1414, during the early Ming era. Although it is surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings nowadays, its external appearance is amply visible, for its lateral side and rear have become like public squares for the residential area.
The mosque had long been closed due to severe damage suffered through the Cultural Revolution, but it has been completely restored, in time for the Olympic Games in Beijing. It was also designated as a Provincial Key Heritage Conservation Unit of Beijing.

Despite the discouraging newish façade facing the front road of the Huashi Mosque, it has fine traditional wooden buildings in its precincts. As the road is on the north, the worship hall is not located in front of visitors but on the right-hand side. The hypostyle hall beyond the front rolled-shed roof building is three spanned in both width and depth with two lines of paired columns in the center, which further enhance its depth.
Beyond the paired columns is the Rear Mihrab Hall, which is thoroughly integrated with the hypostyle hall, not even partitioned by a hanging screen as at the Niujie Mosque. However, their roofs are separated and distinct each other; while the roof of the hypostyle hall is ridged, that of the Rear Mihrab Hall is humpbacked. The roof structure of these halls is of old timber, from which painting has been half faded away, sharply contrasting with the new columns brightly painted in vermilion.

At the center of the ridge of the Rear Mihrab Hall is deeply upward recessed space with an octagonal polychrome ceiling allowing in high-side light through its drum. This part is architecturally the main feature of the mosque and such an ornamental high ceiling is referred to as a ‘Zaojing’ (literally an exquisite ceiling). The Mihrab receiving the light from it is not made as an alcove but flat on the Qibla wall. This rear half of the worship hall must be the Rear Mihrab Hall even if it had been a later addition of the same width. At the inner part of the Mihrab are peculiarly made double doors, which might suggest that there could have been a room beyond.

Strangely a small moon watching tower is behind the worship hall and instead the center of the courtyard is occupied by a tablet pavilion built by the emperor Shizon in 1729. Its grand volume makes the courtyard appear cramped, and its proportion with double tiered gambrel roofs is less attractive than those of the Niujie Mosque.

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04　TIAN JIN　天津 **
Municipality of Tian jin　直轄市

GREAT MOSQUE **
清真大寺

Tianjin, a port city facing the Bohai Sea, is a municipality under direct governmental control, and one of the five national central cities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chongqing). Its center is located 40 km in a straight line from the center of Beijing, and their municipal areas, combined together, count a total population of as many as 20 million. In Tianjin there are 160,000 Hui people, slightly less than in Beijing, embracing a large number of mosques.

The Great Mosque, located in the north of the city, is said to have been first built either in 1644 during the early Qing Dynasty or in 1679, year 18 in the reign of Kangxi (Qing Dynasty). The mosque was later sometimes renovated in the 18th century and greatly enlarged into its current scale in 1801, year 6 in the reign of Jiaqing (also Qing Dynasty).
Despite being the most historical mosque in Tianjin, it was closed for 10 years during the Cultural Revolution and, although its buildings were fortunately undestroyed, most of its over ten thousand books and manuscripts were burnt. Since the government policy of religious liberalization was formulated in 1979, it has revived with buildings being repaired and the construction of a Madrasa (Koranic school) in the southern part of the compound.

Behind the large Zhaobi (mirror wall) and Great Gate, the ensemble of facilities is arranged in the typical Chinese style, around the courtyard, symmetrically on the main axis. However, as the axial Great Gate is only opened at the time of festivals, one usually enters through the right side service gate, on which side is the office and on the other side is the house for the Ahong (Imam).

The courtyard is comparatively shallow, but instead is not closed completely, continuing to the rear courtyard through passages in front of a lecture hall on either side. The rear courtyard, like the first, has abundant vegetation without public-square-like feeling. It displays a ‘palace-style’ layout, putting a pair of old trees facing each other in front of the great hall.
The Great Hall has an open front hall, which once imparted the worship hall with a feeling of ample depth, but recently wooden window frames were fixed in its openings, regrettably transforming its half-outside space into an utter interior space. While some parts of the ensemble are still broken, every building’s exterior has been gaudily repainted, especially in vermilion on wood.

    

The interior of the worship hall, consisting of two buildings, is a quintessential wooden hypostyle hall, showing its exposed magnificent timber frames in the roofs. Nevertheless they are entirely painted in ivory except the lower walls and the bases of columns, which are in green; it gives a much more subdued impression than the external appearance.
On the columns and over the Qibla wall are tablets of Arabic calligraphy. Five serial arches on the Qibla wall form the Mihrabs, which are painted in vermilion, and behind the doors in the arches is the Rear Mihrab Hall made of brick. This manner of composing openings is also adapted to the brick Great Gate; the serial arched vermilion openings on a grey wall are quite brilliant.

The wooden Minbar (Pulpit) in the Great Hall forms a graceful hexagonal shrine-like pavilion, of a style characteristic in this region, though no statue is enshrined inside. Such shrine-like styled Minbars are never seen outside of China in the vast Islamic world.
The Rear Mihrab Hall has five serial pointed tiled roofs, the central one of which is octagonal, the end roofs are hexagonal, and the other two are pyramidal. This splendid roof shape is considered a substitute for the western dome structure, but this can be seen only from the rear at a distance. The southern hexagon is said to be the moon watching tower and the northern one the minaret.

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SOUTHERN GREAT MOSQUE * 清真南大寺

The Southern Great Mosque of Tianjin is located in the Muslim quarter of the southern part of the old citadel area. One reaches there through a kind of temple street at the west of Xima-lu, one of the main avenues in the city. At the entrance of the street stands a ‘Shipailou’ or classical stone pylon, which is roofed with green glazed tiles in the original wooden style, but is now made of concrete. It corresponds to the Japanese ‘Tori-i’ in both the way it stands at the entrance to a shrine and in their resembling forms.
Surrounded by swarming apartment houses, such traditional gates are beneficial for clearly identifying the location of religious facilities. However, this mosque suffered much due to its conspicuousness due to the gate, while most mosques without a gate and set back from the street were saved from demolition during the Cultural Revolution.

As a small mosque is said to have originally been built here in 1575 in the Ming era, this turns out to be the oldest mosque in Tianjin. It was during 1822 to 1845 of the Qing era that it was enlarged to its present scale; this was age that the First Opium War (1839-42) was waged and the city of Tianjin remarkably developed as an international port, in which the Muslim community prospered and numbers of mosques were erected. People sought gorgeousness in their outward design, resulting in a fashion for many lighting towers on the roof; the mosque with the largest number was this Southern Great Mosque, with spectacularly eight towers.
Nevertheless, this most prominent mosque among those in northern China was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and the current mosque, reconstructed after the religious liberalization, has only three lighting towers. Instead, the courtyard beyond the Great Gate was enlarged and lecture buildings on both sides became two-storied, made of concrete.

 

The worship hall is extensive in depth, consisting of three buildings in parallel after the front rolled-shed roof building facing the courtyard. The first building has two lighting towers on left and right and the second has a hexagonal one in the center. The boundary between this and the last building is formed by a consecutive arch screen, which resembles that of the Great Mosque, partitioning off the Rear Mihrab Hall. The large number of columns of the worship hall are painted in light green, sharply contrasting with gold Arabic calligraphy on new black tablets.
Since there is no women’s mosque here like in the Great Mosque, a corner of the hall is separated with a curtain for women’s worship space. There is a newly-made shrine-type Minbar at the innermost point.

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05　XUAN HUA　宣化 *
He bei sheng　河北省

SOUTHERN GREAT MOSQUE **
清真南大寺

 

Currently, Xuanhua is not an independent city but administratively the Xuanhua Ditrict, with a population of 300,000, belongs to the prefecture-level city of Zhangjiakou. Nevertheless, it physically looks a calm independent city 30km from Zhangjiakou by bus, designated as a historic cultural city of Hebei Province.

Xuanhua has four mosques, among which the Northern Great Mosque, first constructed in 1722 or the 61st year of the reign of Kangxi in Ming era, was architecturally the most important but destroyed by the Cultural Revolution. An extant old mosque of the same style is the Southern Great Mosque, recently repaired and preserved with special effort as a cultural heritage of Xuanhua District. When I visited the mosque in 2007, its gate and Bangke Tower (minaret) were undergoing repair work in time for the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008.

The Southern Great Mosque of Xuanhua was first built in 1403, the first year of the reign of the emperor Yongle during the Ming era and was moved to the current site along Miaode Street in Xuanhua in 1821, the first year of the reign of Daoguang during the Qing era. Therefore, it is basically a work from the 19th century, and was greatly improved in 1911 during the reign of Xuantong.
Though its name is written as the Southern Mosque on a stone tablet in situ, it is now called the Southern Great Mosque. In modern China, mosques have not been designated with proper names but often called by its location in a city, so this mosque’s name is the same as that of the preceding chapter of Tianjin.
There remains a plan of the destroyed Northern Great Mosque, which existed before the Cultural Revolution, surveyed by Liu Zhiping (1909-95), an architectural historian. As the Southern Great Mosque is made of almost the same composition, I will explain the mosque based on this plan.

There remains a plan of the destroyed Northern Great Mosque, which existed before the Cultural Revolution, surveyed by Liu Zhiping (1909-95), an architectural historian. As the Southern Great Mosque is made of almost the same composition, I will explain the mosque based on this plan.
Its overall disposition is highly regular as a typical Chinese-style mosque. Thanks to the front street located on the east, it easily forms the symmetrical ‘Siheyuan’ (traditional quadrangle house form around a courtyard) on the main axis; the most fundamental form of Chinese temples regardless of religion. Other religion’s temples, which do not demand such strict direction as in Islam, could actualize their layout system regardless of the shapes or condition of their precincts.
Especially in great temples Siheyuan-form courtyards are strung serially on the main axis with a line of large buildings of hipped or gambrel roofs from the entrance to the inmost place.

Plan of Southern Great Mosque, Xuanhua (From " Ancient Chinese Architecture" by Qiu Yulan, 2003, Springer)

Despite not being such huge mosques, the Southern and Northern Great Mosques of Xuanhua have, at the very front, the Great Gates facing the street, which are mainly used ceremonially, providing sub-gates on both sides as in many other mosques. The main axis stretches from the Great Gate to the west or Makka, with various facilities placed symmetrically on the axis.
There stands a hexagonal Bangke Tower (minaret) in the center, in front of the forecourt. Artistically it is the most symbolic component of the mosque, and appropriately located to perform the call to prayer to townsfolk. As it also functions as the second gate, one goes through it into the orderly courtyard, where there are the Great Hall in front, lecture halls on both sides, and a pair of trees on right and left of the main approach, which is slightly raised and finished with stone. Owing to porticoes in front of those buildings, the courtyard gives an impression like cloisters of Christian monasteries in Europe.

The Great Hall, as usual, consists of three parts: the front rolled-shed roof building, the worship hall, and the Rear Mihrab Hall. As in the case of the Northern Great Mosque it forms a large cross by enlarging the worship hall to both sides. Such easiness of enlargement is an idiosyncrasy of wooden mosques; no matter how wide it is enlarged, it is no problem to lengthen the Qibla wall, as in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. It may be the case that the Northern Great Mosque did not have enough depth in terms of its site; as it is more normal to increase the number of buildings in parallel toward the rear.
The Rear Mihrab Hall is surmounted with a small lighting tower that also functions as a moon watching tower. While it was a square tower at the Northern Great Mosque, the Southern’s tower is hexagonal with a conspicuously curved roof.

A secondary important mosque next to a Great Mosque is sometimes called a Middle Mosque.
When I was not able to enter the precincts of the Great Mosque of Xuanhua due to the construction work, I went to the Middle Mosque along Hui People’s Street to ask for help. Its young Ahong (Imam) telephoned the Great Mosque and accompanied me there and allowed me to take photographs, which I greatly appreciate.

The recently built Middle Mosque of Xuanhua is small and entered from the east, arranging the worship hall in front, the Ahong’s house on the right, a lecture hall on the left around the courtyard with many trees. As the worship hall has a horizontal low ceiling hiding the roof structure, it could not be a pure wooden building.

 

A city called Dingzhou in the Yuan era was later renamed Dingxian for a subsequently long time but was recently turned back to Dingzhou as a county-level city. In the Hui people’s area of this middle-sized peaceful city remains an old mosque from the Yuan era. In its precincts there is one of the oldest Islamic stone tablets written in Chinese characters, ‘Memoir of reconstruction of the Libai Si (mosque)’, in which it is recorded that this mosque was reconstructed in 1348 or the eighth year of the reign of Zhizheng during the Yuan era, although the first construction time was unclear. It might go back to the Song era (960-1279).

There was a Muslim community here at the time of this reconstruction and the mosque was called ‘Libai Si’ (literally Worship Temple), after which its name changed many times, such as ‘Qingzheng Si’ (Pure and Right Temple) in the Qing era, ‘Dingzhou Qingzhen Si’ (Pure and True Temple) or ‘Qingzhen Libai Si’ at present.

As seen in the chapter on Southern China, many mosques from the Yuan era were built of brick, so is the Rear Mihrab Hall of this mosque, with a masonry dome that is called ‘non-beam structure’ in Chinese. This is one of the oldest Islamic brick buildings extant in China. Its brick-piled upper part with tiled roof, looking like a second story in order to appear more imposing, seems to have been added in the Ming or Qing era; it is the way of sculptural architecture as often practiced in India.
The interior of this Rear Mihrab Hall is too small to accommodate the increasing number of worshippers, so the worship hall has been enlarged many times. Most of the current buildings in the precincts are made of wood.

Cross Section of Cingzhou Mosque, Dingzhou (From Liu Zhi-ping: Islamic Architecture in China, Urumqi, 1985)

Since the front street is on the south side, the Great Gate is not on the main axis; one enters through it and turns 90 degrees to the left and goes through the second gate into the courtyard. The two storied Great Gate has a wooden square hall at the upper floor over the brick-made three-arched ground structure. This might have also served as the Bangke Tower (minaret).

On both sides of the courtyard are the lecture hall and Ahong’s house and ahead is the open front building of the Great Hall on a one-step-higher terrace. It is written on the tablet that this Siheyuan-form layout was accomplished during restoration under the reign of Zhengde (1506-22) in the Ming era.

The worship hall is a relatively small single building, the roof skelton of which is painted in full color as at the Buddhist temple near Zhengding. A unique point is that a brick passageway roofed with a tunnel vault connects the worship hall and the Rear Mihrab Hall. It is a method to combine different kinds of structures as also seen in the Zengjiao Mosque in Hangzhou.

The Mihrab in the Rear Mihrab Hall is made of wood, ornamented with gold bands of Arabic calligraphies on a red background, and stretches across the full width of the room. The transitional part from the square plan to the circular dome is the most impressive, for it does not use the usual corbelling squinches but brick bracket-sets in the Chinese style.
It is quite a valuable building that, together with the so-cold Woges Tomb in Guangzhou, passes down to us a brick dome structure of the Yuan era. This mosque was designated as a Key Heritage Conservation Unit of Hebei Province.

 

The city of Changzhou accommodates a large number of Hui people and dozens of large and small mosques, which form the Siheyuan style in common and their Great Halls consist of three parts: the front rolled-shed roof building, worship hall and Rear Mihrab Hall.
The Northern Great Mosque is located in the center of the Hui people’s district and faces one of the city’s main avenues, Jiefang Donglu. A long building along the grand avenue functions as a surrounding wall of the precincts on the upper level and its ground floor contains a line of many shops forming the ‘Qingzhen Street’, literally Pure and True Street, for Hui people, selling ‘Pure and True foods’ and clothing for Muslims.

As seen in the aerial photograph of this district of the city of Changzhou, this avenue was produced based on a modern town plan. Formerly it was a narrow street. Such a situation can be seen when looking at another mosque in this district, the Southern Great Mosque, in the same photo. Before modern planned streets were executed, no matter how large a mosque was, it usually did not face a main street but a narrow lane with shops of Qingzhen foods, which is still the case in the famous Huajuexiang Mosque in Xian.

Since the Northern Great Mosque came to face a main avenue, its presence has become conspicuous, as the result of which it suffered rather serious destruction during the Cultural Revolution. Its restoration began in 1980 and was completed in 1991, making its Great Hall as beautiful as new.
As the main entrance to the mosque was changed from the original east side to the Jiefang Donglu Avenue side, the old second gate on the east was removed, consequently making the area of the courtyard larger than when Liu Zhiping surveyed the mosque in 1936, and bringing a good balance between it and the Great Hall, which is one of the largest among mosques in northern China. The Northern Great Mosque of Changzhou retains the traditional inland Chinese style, while the Southern Great Mosque has become a borrowed style mosque from pseudo-Persian or pseudo-Turkish architecture.

 

The Northern Great Mosque was constructed in 1420, or the 18th year of the reign of Yongle during the Ming era, according to “Historical Place-names in Changzhou”, but it is also said that it was first built in 1402 during the early Ming era. It was later reconstructed many times, and is assumed to have attained to its current form in the early or middle Qing era.
One approaches the present premises through steps of the Great Gate facing Jiefang Donglu Street, forming a right angle with the main axis. On the opposite side of the gate in the courtyard has been ereced a two-storied concrete building containing lecture halls and a women’s mosque, surmounted with a tile-roofed Bangke Tower (Minaret). In northern China, freestanding Bangke Towers were not usually erected, unlike those in Linxia in western China. The area of the precincts is 7,400 square meters.

The Great Hall is large-scale and the formation of its roofs is quite conspicuous. There is a front building with a rolled shed roof at the forefront, then two grand hipped roofs for the worship hall, and at the rear stands a row of three high pinnacle-like roofs over the Rear Mihrab Hall. They all are roofed with new green enameled tile, attracting the eye of passersby on the avenue. Especially, the roof-composition of the Rear Mihrab Hall with an octagonal turret, functioning also as a lighting tower, in the center and double-storied square roofs on both sides is never seen in Japan.

   

In contrast to that, the interior of the Great Hall is less decorative and overall painted white, giving an impression of simplicity and purity. It used to be described as a ‘nine-by-nine-span, eighty-one bay’ great hall, but actually it consists of 49 bays with seven by seven spans as a square hypostyle hall.

The two adjacent roof skeletons of the worship hall of 1,200 square meters are magnificently exposed, showing its vigorous interior space. Although the Mihrab itself is simple, the ‘Zaojing’ ceiling in front of it is quite impressive owing to its lower ‘laternendecke’ (lantern ceiling) structure and the colorfully painted top part among the totally whitewashed interior. Such a restrained ornamentation is agreeable as well as impessive. I believe that on the whole this is one of the best Chinese mosques.
What finally deserves special mention is the shrine-like Minbar (pulpit) that is considered to be the most beautiful example in China by means of its nice proportion and its exquisite craft work.

 

Botou is a small county-level city belonging administratively to prefecture-level city of Changzhou, from which it is about 40km distant. Previously called Bozhen, it prospered industrially thanks to the convenience of transportation by means of the Great Canal within the city, which flowed from Beijing to Hangzhou, and saw the construction of many temples and mosques.
The main mosque is located at the southern end of Qingzhen Street to the west of the canal, and was called Bozhen Qingzhen Si until recently. The area of its precincts is 11,200 square meters, with neighboring women’s mosque to the north, and its foreground is neatly arranged like a large public square.

The first construction of the Bozhen Mosque goes back to the age of Hongwu (1368-98) during the Ming era according to “Historical Place-names in Changzhou”, but there is another opinion that it was built in 1404, or the second year of the Yongle age. It seems to have been enlarged up to its current scale in the age of Chongzhen (1628-45) at the end of the Ming era, and attained architecturally to its current form in the age of Kangxi (1662-1722) in the early Qing era, and has a tablet of the year 41 of Kangxi (1702) in the Great Hall. The women’s mosque is said to have been built at the end of the Qing era.

The single story Great Gate with a gambrel roof, facing the square, is of the style of the Wumen Gate in the Forbidden City in Beijing, with service gateways on both sides. The main axis stretches straight from here in the direction of Macca, with a large group of buildings placed on it symmetrically; it is intriguing why it is not called a Great Mosque. Its courtyard is so extensive in depth that it is divided into some sections in order, reminding one of the Huajuexiang Mosque in Xian.

On either side of the first yard is a lecture hall and on the axis is the Minaret called Bangke Tower, standing symbolically. Its height is close to 20 meters, and also functions as a moon watching tower. Its first story is the second gate and the second story is surmounted with twofold roof; the upper roof of the three in total has stronger curves than the lower, displaying overall a peculiar proportion.

The second yard is surrounded with two halls at the south and north and uniquely has one more gate named ‘Flower Palace’ before the third yard that is raised a meter or so. According to Liu Zhiping, the gate was constructed later than the middle of the Qing era and also called ‘Folding Screen Gate’, full of colors and ornaments such as bracket sets of deep eaves.
The third yard is a grand platform called a lunar terrace with two lecture halls, the southern of which is said to have been an elementary school and the northern a university, and further north are the Ahong’s house, a ritual washing room and a women’s mosque.

The Great Hall is in a similar scale and form to that of the Northern Great Mosque of Cangzhou in the preceding chapter, consisting of the front rolled-shed roof building, continual-two-building worship hall, and the Rear Mihrab Hall. Its entire scale is 26 m wide and 44 m deep, admitting 1,200 worshippers at the same time.

The fact that this grand scale is the result of successive enlargements is easily realized when looking at the roof composition. The front side building of the worship hall has a gambrel roof with larger span and higher ridge, while the rear has a twofold roof and different style edges, showing clearly later construction. Furthermore, the Rear Mihrab Hall has a pyramidal roof based on a square plan with a strong independent appearance, suggesting that it is of much later construction.
Therefore the Mihrab of the Bozhen Mosque must have been relocated many times, and the current one in the square hall does not have a niche but is only painted flat on the Qibla Wall, with Arabic calligraphy and flower paintings.

 

What is quite interesting here is the formation of the Rear Mihrab Hall. While there are three successive high ceiling bays on the extremely oblong Rear Mihrab Hall in the Northern Great Mosque of Changzhou, there is only one grand hexagonal high ceiling space over a square hall here. It also forms an outwardly independent looking hexagonal tower of 34 m in height.
While its internal lower part is a line of windows for lighting, the upper part is constituted of piled up hexagonal wooden frames consecutively decreasing in size to the top, namely a ceiling of the ‘laternendecke’ structure, which is seen in high ceilings of folk houses from Central Asia to Caucasia. It could have originated in stone masonry structure. Here it is said to have been built without using iron nails but using wooden tenons and mortises only.

The Bozhen Mosque suffered heavily during the Cultural Revolution. Its reconstruction was started in 1982 by the State Council’s Bureau of Religions and Provincial Bureau of Culture, and it was designated as a National Key Heritage Conservation Unit in 2005, which might have been boosted by the fact that this mosque was used as a place of underground activity of the Communist Party and place of education of the party’s later leading members as a ‘Evening School for the poor’ or a ‘Evening School for workers’ during the Chinese Civil War.
When I visited in 2007, it was in the last phase of restoration in time for the Olympic Games in Beijing.

 

Jinan, with a population of 2,500,000, is the capital of Shandong Province. It was a prosperous city since ancient times and the historical stage of the Jinan incident, in which the Japanese army occupied it and slaughtered many citizens. The old city was encircled with walls and moats, doubly around the inner and outer areas.
In the outer area to the west are located the Southern Great Mosque, a women’s mosque, and the Northern Great Mosque, near to each other, facing the same street of Yongchang.

The Southern is older; it is written in the stone tablet of “Restorations of the Mosque” that a mosque in another place was moved here in 1295 or 1355 during the Yuan era, though the first mosque’s construction date is not known. In 1495 during the Ming era it seems to have been enlarged into the current Siheyuan-like layout. It is assumed that the extensive restoration in 1874, or the 13th year of Douji’s reign during the Qing era, brought about the current form.

The site area of the Southern Great Mosque is 6,330 square meters, and its main axis stretches straight from the Great Gate up to the Mihrab of the Great Hall, thanks to the frontal street located to the east. This gate, facing the five-meter high Zhaobi (mirror wall), is a somewhat strange-shaped, untraditional brick building of two stories with a tiled roof. Its rectangular plan is eight meters wide and six meters deep. It looks like a construction after the Cultural Revolution because of its disharmony with neighboring buildings, and yet it actually was erected in 1914 during the reign of the Republic of China.

One goes through the gate into the forecourt with facilities on both sides, such as the ritual ablution room and Ahong’s house. In front of the forecourt is the two-storied moon watching tower, functioning also as the second gate and consisting of a brick ground floor and a wooden upper floor with a tiled hip roof like the Great Gate. It is said to have been reconstructed in 1936 or the 25th year of the Republic of China. Both buildings are not in the pure Chinese style but much influenced by colonial architecture, which can be also applied to the colonnades around the Great Hall. The parts looking brick-made are actually made of reinforced concrete.
Thus the coexistence of many styles of various ages has resulted overall in a deficiency of a feeling of unity in this mosque.

As the precincts of this Southern Great Mosque is sloped to the east, its courtyard with a lecture hall on either side is higher than the forecourt by three meters, and moreover the Great Hall stands on a terrace of 4.2 meters high, from which one can get a good view. The Great Hall consists of three parts: the front rolled-shed roof building, front-side, and rear-side buildings of the worship hall, making an area of 1,200 square meters in total. The worship hall has a great depth of ten spans while the width is five, capable of accommodating up to 1,000 worshippers at the same time.

The portico covered with a rolled-shed gambrel roof was added in the Qing era. As for the worship hall, it is single storied and covered with a hip roof, accompanied with colonnades on its four sides. Between its front-side and rear-side buildings is a ‘Huanmen’ screen of serial arches as usual, lightly dividing the hall into front and rear halves.
Similarly to the Northern Great Mosque, it does not have a Rear Mihrab Hall projected to the rear; the Mihrab is only painted on the flat Qibla wall.

(Unfortunately, I was not able to take enough photos of this mosque or the Northern Great Mosque, because of technical problems with my camera.)

 

The Northern Great Mosque, along with the Southern Great Mosque, is located in the small Hui people’s district in southern Jinan. This Luoyuan district embraces about 30,000 people, of which more than one third is said to be Hui people. The reason that two great mosques are located so close to each other could be the necessity for two mosques at the Islamic festivals of Eid, since there is no Eidgah (open-air mosque for the festivals of Eid) in Jinan.
Although the women’s mosque located between them is said to have been first built in the Qing era, the current ‘Arabic’ style dome mosque was completed recently, in 1994. Its land area is 600 square meters and its worship hall can accommodate 400 women. Even though construction of women’s mosques is a characteristic of Chinese Islam, this is one of the largest among them.

There are two views regarding the time of the first construction of the Northern Great Mosque: one is the seventh year of the reign of Hongzhi during the Ming era (1495), the other is the 30th year of the reign of Qianlong during the Qing era (1765). It was also heavily repaired or reconstructed several times during the Qing era and in early years of the Republic of China.
Its location and composition of facilities are quite similar to those of the Southern Great Mosque. The scale of the Great Hall is slightly smaller but a two storied school was constructed at its innermost plot in 2002 so that this mosque has become the learning center of Islamic culture in Shandong Province.

Like the Southern, the Northern Great Mosque faces the frontal street of Yongchang to the east, its main axis stretches straight from the Zhaobi and Great Gate in the direction of Macca, placing all the buildings symmetrically, as seen in the aerial photo. As every building takes the traditional Chinese palace style here, its premises overall have a much greater feeling of unity than the Southern.
Both mosques’ components and arrangements are almost the same: the two courtyard system with the main gate, second gate, southern and northern lecture halls, and Great Hall (front rolled-shed roof building plus front and middle and rear parts of the worship hall). The difference is that the Northern does not have an independent Bangke Tower, and the moon-watching tower is not over the second gate but on the Great Hall. However, most of those facilities were demolished during the Cultural Revolution, so those we can see now are new ones reconstructed after 1989. When I visited in 2007, the last phase of repair work around the Great Hall was in operation.

The Great Gate, which is amply set back from the frontal street, is used on ceremonial occasions only; one usually enters through side gates on both sides. Beyond each side gate is a circular aperture called a moon-gate, through which one goes into the forecourt. The second gate is smallish but leads to the large courtyard with southern and northern lecture halls of five spans in width and then two-span side halls.
The Great Hall of the Northern Great Mosque, preceded by a frontal corridor, is a huge worship hall consisting of three parallel buildings, much larger than that of the Southern Great Mosque, probably as the result of sequential additions to the rear, though without Rear Mihrab Hall as at the Southern. Its area attained to 900 square meters, acceptable for 1,000 worshippers at the same time. It has two folded gambrel roofs on brick walls.

In spite of having a moon-watching tower over the middle building among three of the worship hall, it is not a lighting tower, so the interior has no high ceiled space. Forty thick columns are all painted in dark green, sharply contrasting with dark red beams and ceilings.

 

While Jining is a prefecture-level city, the administrative area of which is so large as to include the hometown of Confucius: Qufu, and that of Mencius: Zoucheng, its present physical city area has a population of about one million. The most conspicuous element of the city is the Great Canal flowing through the center, which was dug from 1286 to 1293, connecting the capital Dadu (current Beijing) to the north and Hangzhou to the south through the five great rivers: the Hai River, Huang River (Yellow River), Quasi River, Yangtze River, and Qiantang River.

Jining, facing the Great Canal, gained great importance in terms of traffic both on land and on river as a distribution center of materials and commodities, and prospered so much as to be called northern Suzhou.
Large numbers of Muslims migrated here in and after the Yuan era as competent merchants, constructing many mosques too. It is said that there were seven large mosques and two women’s mosques before liberation in 1949.

However, for Chinese Muslims, Jining was one of the most seriously damaged cities during the Cultural Revolution. Among four great mosques in Jining the Western, Northern and Southern Great Mosques were all destroyed, only leaving the oldest, the Eastern, which has fortunately survived. The most important, the Northern was larger than the Eastern, admitting 5,000 people worshiping in its Great Hall at the same time; it is an unfathomable loss for the history of Islam in China.
The population of Muslims in Jining also decreased sharply through emigration, and there are only two mosques nowadays: the Eastern Great Mosque and Liuxing Mosque.

The Eastern Great Mosque is located in the Hui people’s district in southern Jining as one of the largest mosques in China. In spite of severe damage suffered from the Cultural Revolution, it was thoroughly restored after 1980.
Since the mosque fronts the Great Canal (Old Canal), it was also called Eastern Great Mosque of Shunhe (River). Its eastern gate facing the canal was previously the main entrance, but people now usually enter through the rear-side gate facing Qingping Street, which has become one of the main streets in the city.

As for the time of its first construction, there are several views, one of which is related on a tablet from the Qing era, that a mosque built at Mianhua Avenue under the reign of Tianshun (1465-88) during the Yuan era was relocated to this current site. Other views insist that it was first constructed in the Hongwu period (1368-99) or Xuande period (1426-35), both during the Ming era, and it seems that it attained to its current scale in the Kangxi period (1662-1723) during the Qing era.

The area of its precincts is 6,200 square meters, lining up, from the canal side, the Shipaifang (stone pylon), Great Gate, Bangke Tower, tablet pavilions, southern and northern lecture halls, Great Hall, Ahong’s house, ritual washing room moon watching tower, and rear gate, all on the main axis. Liu Zhiping considered that only the Great Gate was erected in the Ming era and the others were from the Qianlong period during the Qing era, judging from their styles.
For such a large mosque complex as this, its site is a little too short in depth. Its courtyards are shallower than those of the Huajuexiang Mosque in Xian, and its intervals between gates are also confined. It is considered that enlargement of the site on the direction of the main axis was difficult because of its tight location sandwiched between the east side canal and the west side street.

On the canal side, various gates, starting with a wooden fence door, are sequenced.　 A Shipaifang (stone pylon) is rarely seen in mosques, on which, along with the columns of the Great Gate, a variety of animal figures, such as dragons, are carved, giving a strong Chinese impression rather than Islamic. The gates other than the Great Gate are not for practical use but for ornamental purpose like in Xian.

The two storied Bangke Tower in the courtyard also has a curious composition: the arbor-like open ground floor is surmounted by a hexagonal upper story with a tiled pointed roof. As its position in front of the Great Hall cannot be considered suitable for calling neighborhood people to come and worship, it seems also more ornamental than practical. On both sides of it are tablet pavilions roofed with orange color enameled tiles, which are rimmed with green tiles still more decoratively.

The Great Hall consists of three parts: the front rolled-shed roof building, the extensive worship hall, and the Rear Mihrab Hall, counting 1,050 square meters in total, and admitting up to 2,000 worshippers at the same time. This great hypostyle hall with 40 wooden and 12 stone columns is not partitioned, and is covered with a single gambrel roof, producing a huge interior space. Its width is 28meters of seven spans, the depth is 23meters of six spans, and the highest point attains to 18meters. The timber frames of the roof structure are exposed without a ceiling, giving a magnificent impression.
Surprisingly, people may enter the hypostyle hall without first taking off their shoes.

 

The Rear Mihrab Hall is also so grand that unusually two columns stand inside. Although the two halls originally formed a single space, now a glass screen is fixed to separate them, likely because the space of the Rear Mihrab Hall is large enough for a usual congregation and the air should be insulated in cold weather.
The design of the Rear Mihrab Hall is wonderful, dazzling one by the ensemble of the Mihrab, Arabic calligraphy, tablets on the Qibla wall, and the gorgeous shrine-like Mimbar.
What is mysterious is its colorfully painted ceiling, flat despite the exterior view of the Rear Mihrab Hall being a three storied building. It is actually not a lighting tower for the Mihrab, and therefore has no high-ceiling space. Moreover, regardless of its best location for a Bangke Tower (minaret) for calling to neighboring people for worship, the upper stories of this 30meter-high building has no practical function.
In short, this Eastern Great Mosque is full of decorative elements on the whole.

Behind the Great Hall is the Rear Great Gate, the upper story of which is a moon watching tower. It has carved stone columns at the periphery of its ground floor like at the Great Gate, displaying itself as a splendid independent building.
This mosque has three Ahongs (Imams), who also take the role of Muezzins. A young Ahong, who graduated from Jining Islam College, guided me around the site in English.

 

The Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is located in the northernmost part of China, administratively occupying the third largest area after the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and the Tibet Autonomous Region. It neighbors on Mongolia (Outer Mongolia). In spite of its designation as Mongolia, the Mongolian population is only 17%; most are Han people with less than 1% of Hui people.

The capital city of Huhehote, which embraces the Great Mosque as the religious base of the Hui people, literally means a ‘Blue Citadel’, founded in the 16th century by Altan Khan. In contrast to the image of a long-lived old city, it has grown into a modern commercial city, making the traditional style Great Mosque, which faces a greatly enlarged main road, quite conspicuous. Since it is the oldest among eight mosques in Huhehote’s urban area, it is called the Qingzhen Dasi (Great Mosque).

The mosque is said to have been first built in 1693, or the 32nd year of the reign of Kangxi (Qing dinasty), on a small scale. It was reconstructed in 1789, or the 54th year of Qianlong (also Qing dinasty) as a full-scale mosque due to the immigration of a large number of Muslims from the Xinjian and other regions.
Afterwards various facilities were added, and in the 20th century Hui people raised funds on a large scale to repair and reconstruct the mosque extensively in 1923 to 25 into its current state. Furthermore, a moon watching tower was erected in 1939 to complete the mosque’s make-up.

Based on the mixing of various ages, ethnicities and architectural styles through such an intricate historical process, some people consider this mosque as a symbol of the ‘five ethnic groups together in harmony’ (the Han, Manchus, Mongols, Hui, and Tibetan people) in China.

   

The area of its precincts is 4,000 square meters, placing buildings on the east-west axis. However, in accordance with the promotion of the west side street into a main broad avenue, a new gate was constructed to the west and its front square has been well arranged, along with a line of Qingzhen (pure and true, Halal) food shops, changing the position of the main entrance to the premises to the opposite side.

Since Chinese mosque architecture only developed the form of the ‘Siheyuan’ (traditional quadrangle house layout around a courtyard) on the main axis from east to west, it has not devised arrangements suitable for the west-side-entrance sites. Despite the Great Mosque of Huhehote having a long distance east to west, and possessing many courtyards as at the Huajuexiang Mosque of Xian, one mostly enters through a side lane to the western courtyard as at the Niujie Mosque of Beijing, less actively utilizing the eastern courtyard.
As for the ritual washing room, it remains located in a spot favorable for worshippers coming from the east to cleanse their bodies first, before going to the Great Hall, and so is in a less convenient position today.

The third courtyard, counted from the east, is the principal courtyard, surrounded with southern and northern lecture halls, the Great Hall to the west, and a large two-storied building to the east. This building contains a dining hall in the ground floor and a library in the upper, constituting a Madrasa (Islamic school) together with the lecture halls. Now a women’s mosque has been built of reinforced concrete with a small school to the north, closely connected with the Great Mosque.

At the southeast corner of the courtyard is a modern minaret of five stories. Here it is not called a Bangke Tower as usual but a moon watching tower; I wonder if that is because of its location at the innermost part of the courtyard, not on the road side. The moon watching tower, characteristic of Chinese Islam, functions to announce the end of the fasting hours through watching the moon’s waxing and waning every evening in Ramadan, and often functions as a minaret too.
Huhehote’s hexagonal tower contains a spiral staircase, made of brick in the lower four stories and surmounted with a wooden pavilion. Its style is a compromise between Chinese and Western, well resembling the Bangke Towers over the second gate of the Eastern Great Mosque in Xining.

 

The Great Hall is not as large as those of the Great Mosques in Jinan or Jining, admitting only 500 worshippers at the same time. Probably for that reason, its plan is a simple rectangle of a hypostyle hall, without a frontal colonnaded building or a Rear Mihrab Hall. Nevertheless, it is covered with four parallel roofs, each of which has a lighting tower or two for its interior. Its external appearance with as many as five towers as a whole is spectacular.

Its façade design is also quite curious in its expressionist feeling. One must suppose that it might be the Mongol style, but actually it is said to have been the result of Western influence. Liu Zhiping considered it to have a ‘colonial flavor’ during the age of the Republic of China. Partitions of walls by pilasters, and possibly its excessive decoration, would have been its result.

Although the entrance to the worship hall is three serial arched apertures, windows on both sides are not arched but supported with horizontal lintels, which would indicate the outer walls most likely made of reinforced concrete. Its interior quadrangle space of five by five bays might be roofed using a steel frame: if it is wooden, its roof structure would have been exposed without a flat ceiling.
Inside the Great Hall there stand four regular lines of four columns, leaving, before the Qibla wall, a shallow space that is utilized to form an opulent three-dimensional Mihrab. What is particularly impressive here are the pictorial paintings on beams, coffered ceiling and the walls of high-ceiling spaces.

This Great Mosque of Huhehote possesses 30 antique books of Koran translated into Chinese, which are important materials for the study of the history of Chinese Islam.

 

Datong is a city with a population of 1.1 million, located in the northernmost part of Shanxi Province. Although in the central area, the Great Mosque, the sole mosque in the old city district, subsists quietly, in a narrow alley from the ‘Qingzhen Street’ lined with food stalls. What faces the street is a half Western style building from the Republic of China, the central part of which forms an entrance to the mosque precincts.
Northern Datong neighbors the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the capital of which, Huehote, is quite near. This might be the reason that the façade of this building resembles that of the Great Hall of Huehote with pilasters, which partition the walls, and curved high parapets.
Since the front street is to the east, the main axis stretches straight from here to the west, setting various buildings in line.

A stone tablet in the premises, ‘Memoir of royal construction of the Qingzhen Si [Mosque]’, says that this mosque was first built in the second year of the Zhenguan period under the reign of the second emperor of the early Tang era, Taizong, or 628 AD, said to be the same in the cases as the Nanmendou Mosque in Fuzhou and some others. However, according to Okimichi Tasaka this tablet must be a forgery from a later age, imitating ‘Memoir of the first construction of the Qingzhen Si’ tablet of Xian’s mosque, embedding in it from a false view that Islam was brought to China in the second year of the Zhenguan period.

There are as many as 14 tablets here and one of them states that the mosque was founded during the Yongle period (1403-24) during the Ming era, seeming most authentic. It is considered that the original mosque was not quite large enough, so it was enlarged after a short interval, probably in the Chenghua period (1465-87) during the same era.
However, since this place, near to Mongolia, gained a large Muslim population in the Yuan era, there seems to have been a ‘Libai Si (mosque) older than this Great Mosque. Uygur Muslims were called the ‘Semu (literally meaning ‘color-eye’) People’ and were given preferential treatment after Mongolians, so there must have been many mosques here in that era. The current buildings of the Great Mosque were reconstructions during the Ming and Qing eras.

The premises starts from a tiny Great Gate, followed by the square Bangke Tower (minaret)-cum-second gate, repaired in the first year of the Tianqi period (1621) during the Ming era, after which is the courtyard. As the two storied Bangke Tower is open to four directions on the ground floor, its form is called a ‘passing through cruciform pavilion’. Its structure is a mix of wooden frames and brick arched walls. The wooden part is now considerably damaged so it needs to be thoroughly repaired.

The courtyard, with lecture halls on both sides, had a pond in the center, where worshipers crossed a stone bridge to reach the Great Hall in the past. It is rare to see this form in a mosque, despite many examples in palace architecture. Though the pond has been reclaimed, the balustrades of the bridge still survive and on either side of them are set plant boxes.

The area of the Great Hall is 490 square meters, consisting of four buildings: the open front building, the front part and rear part of the worship hall, and the Rear Mihrab Hall. The open front building has a rolled-shed roof, while the front part of the worship hall has a gambrel roof, the rear part has a hipped roof, and the Rear Mihrab Hall has a humpbacked hip roof with a small conical roof on top despite the small scale. Thus the Great Hall overall forms quite a complicated constitution, but one can hardly look at its external appearance due to the lack of space in the precincts. Furthermore its continuous flat ceiling, apart from the open front building, does not allow people inside to perceive its complicated roof formation.

However, the front and rear parts of the worship hall are partitioned by a sort of ‘Huanmen’ screen with three arches, which is fitted with glass probably for the purpose of insulation in winter. The thickness of the pillars indicates that the structure is not wooden but of reinforced concrete. The invisibilyty of the roof structure seems to be also for that reason.
Judging from the poor state of the wooden front building, it can be said that an overall restoration is necessary, and it would be desirable to bring it to the original state as much as possible.
A small Zaojing with elaborate carvings gives a flourishing accent to the Great Hall.

 

Taiyuan is the capital of Shanxi Province, the political and economic center since ancient times. Its current administrative area embraces a population of about 2.6 million, in the center of which is located the Old Mosque.

The Old Qingzhen Si (Mosque) of Taiyuan was once called Qingxiu Si (literally meaning Pure and Practice Temple) or Chongzhen Si (Venerable and True Temple). The age of its first construction, according to a 19th century stone tablet in the premises, was in the Zhenyuan period (785-805) during the Tang era, but it is unreliable just as the Great Mosque of Datong was established in the second year of the Zhenyuan period during the Tang era, as discussed in the previous chapter. The Zhenyuan period almost accords with the period of the fifth caliph of the Abbasid dinasty, Harun al-Rashid, (786-809). Though an envoy was sent to China from Damascus in this period, this was not an age of missionary activity.
The view that Islam was brought to China during Tang era was likely based on false information that confused thousands of Uygur reinforcements, who came to suppress the An Lushan Rebellion in the Tang era, for Huihui (i.e. Muslim) soldiers from Tazi (i.e. Arabia), but at that time Uygur people were not yet Muslims but followers of Manichaeism.

While the age of its establishment is not known, it is said that the Old Mosque had taken its current form in the early Qing era. It suffered much from the Cultural Revolution and has been entirely repaired under the religious resuscitation policy.

Although the original entrance was the Great Gate facing the eastern street, Southern Beef Street, it was changed to the western side, when a little distant street, Liberation Avenue, was immensely enlarged to become one of the main roads in the city in 1958, providing a lane to the avenue, constructing a Mupailou (wooden pylon) and was Western Great Gate as the main entrance.

   
Plan of the Old Mosque of Taiyuan and a column (From " Ancient Chinese Architecture" by Qiu Yulan, Springer)

The original constitution of the mosque facilities, except its current entry lane, is very interesting, because despite its faithfulness to the mosque principle, its substantial result is quite unique. The current Rear Gate (originally the Great Gate) faces east, so the main axis stretches from here straight in the direction of Macca, making the plan of the premises completely symmetrical. It forms a two-courtyard-plan, but not as usual, the two courtyards do not loosely adjoin with each other but are thoroughly separated, making it impossible to look from one to the other.
It is regretful that each courtyard was not able to be extensive enough due to the short depth of the overall precincts. The total area is about 2,800 square meters.

The more extensive first courtyard (forecourt) has cloisters on both sides of the Rear Gate, and lecture halls and a ritual washing room in the eastern and western wings. The central two-storied building is called 'Xingxin Lou' (Pavilion for Introspection) as at the Huajuexiang Mosque in Xian. It seems to function as a minaret and a moon watching tower from its architectural form, all the more now that the Bangke tower beyond the Great Hall has been demolished.
However, it is prevalent nowadays to use loudspeakers to call neighborhood people to come and worship in the mosque, so functionally speaking, a minaret is no longer practically necessary. A contemporary minaret is expected only to be a symbol for an Islamic worship space, so might this be the case at the Xingxin Lou.
It is surmounted with a twofold gambrel roof.

In addition there is a pair of small hexagonal pavilions for stelae on the rear on both sides and a library (a hall to read and lecture on the Koran) at the innermost place, making the courtyard a little cramped. The ground story of the library can be passed through into the second courtyard.
A door at the tunneled passage, usually left open, is covered with an iron sheet to function as a fire-prevention door in an emergency. Together with thick brick walls surrounding the whole rear area from this point, it makes a fire-protected division so that the area would be safe even if a fire spreads from the courtyard. Such a protection system from fire in old temples or mosques is quite rare in China.

This might be a reason that the thick circumferential fire wall of the area confines the second courtyard into a peculiarly small and narrow form hardly seen in other mosques. Furthermore the roofs of its cloisters make the courtyard’s opening ratio to the sky still smaller. Since this courtyard is the sole source of light for the Great Hall, it gives an impression of a light well.

The area of the Great Hall is about 500 square meters, admitting about 500 worshippers. It consists of front and rear parts, with a humpback roof for the front and a gable roof for the rear, as usual. Its interior is gloomy, making the paintings on all the surfaces of columns and beams emerge mystically.
Particularly, the Mihrab and its surroundings are splendidly decorated with red and gold colors and its outer frame is carved with Arabic passages from the Koran. A troop of mini-brackets set over the Mihrab is extremely elaborate, and on the right side of the Mihrab is a tall Minbar with 13 steps.

A line of columns just before the Mihrab, with wooden arches, form a kind of Huanmen screen and the three bays in front of the Mihrab are encircled with balustrades as a small Rear Mihrab Hall, giving an impression resembling the Maqsura (space for nobles) of the Mezquita in Cordoba.
The Muslims here, especially the women, were so conservative and exclusive; it was difficult to take photographs of the inside of the mosque.

 

Qinyang is a small city located 70 km northwest from Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province, and is now included in the area of the prefecture-level city of Jiaozuo. It is the birthplace of the 9th century great poet of the late Tang dinasty, Li Shangyin.
Henan Province embraces the third largest number of Muslims after the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and Gansu Province as a result of immigration of Hui soldiers during the Yuan and Ming eras. Hui people lived especially in the cities of Kaifeng and Qinyang, where they constructed numerous mosques.

The oldest in Henan Province is the Northern Great Mosque of Qinyang. The year it was established is not clear due to a variety of opinions, one of which insists that it was first constructed in the Zhizheng period (1341-70) during the late Yuan era and reconstructed in the fourth year of Jiajing period (1526) during the Ming era, and enlarged still further under the Qing dinasty. The Rear Mihab Hall made of brick, called a ‘no-beam structure’ like the mosque of Dingzhou, displays the style of the Yuan era through its arches and a dome, though its original structure was demolished by an earthquake during the Qing era and reconstructed in the 13th year of the Guangzhu period (1887) toward the end of the Qing era. Now a women’s mosque has been established at an adjacent northern site.

As its front street is ideally located to the east, all the buildings are placed symmetrically on the central axis stretching straight from the Great Gate to the direction of Macca. Probably due to the narrowness of the original precincts, the width of courtyards and the Great Hall are not wide enough, actually only about ten meters. Instead, its depth is as great as some 80m, forming a two courtyard constitution.

Cross Section of Northern Great Mosque, Qinyang (From Liu Zhi-ping: Islamic Architecture in China, Urumqi, 1985)

The Great Gate was built in the fourth year of the Jiaqing period during the Qing era (1799) and was recently reconstructed in 1987; I wonder whether it had been demolished under the Cultural Revolution. A photograph in Liu Zhiping’s book shows it as a triple-shallow-arched brick wall, whereas the current gate is made of wood and its right and left bays each embrace a stone tablet. However, its roof form, overall scale, and brick Zhaobis (Mirror Walls) stretching diagonally on both sides, have not been altered. One can see through from its central entrance bay 30 m up to the Great Hall.

On the right and left sides of the first courtyard (forecourt) are a guest house and the Ahong’s house. A building standing before the second, or the main, courtyard is not called the second gate but a ‘Passing Through Building’, made much simpler than the Great Gate. In most Chinese style mosques, the second gate is two-storied, functioning also as a minaret, but this building has only one story. I was much surprised to see a steel skeletal tower on its side: a minaret! I have not seen such a completely practical minaret to this extent, lacking any decoration or ornamentation. Was it a temporary makeshift structure?

The courtyard has, as usual, traditional lecture halls on the north and south sides with humpback gable roofs, and the Great Hall in front. All buildings from the Great Gate are three spanned on their frontage due to the long and narrow site. The courtyard itself is a square shaped, with sides of ten meters. If it had a central water tank or a fountain basin, it would come close to the western mosque, but Chinese style mosques are never furnished with them. It might be because ‘Siheyuan’ (traditional quadrangle house formed around a courtyard) was like that.

 

The Great Hall is 10m in width and 36m in depth, consisting of the front rolled-shed roof building, front and rear parts of the worship hall, and the Rear Mihrab Hall. Contrasting with the short depth of the mosque of Taiyuan in the previous chapter, it is unusually long. The front building is also called a reception building, used as an open drawing room, looking like an Iwan (Aivan) in a Middle Eastern courtyard house.

The front part of the worship hall is roofed in the gambrel form and the rear is gabled; this difference might have been a result of enlargements in different ages. Their inside space is partitioned by a recent unattractive plain screen. The roof structure, originating from the early Qing era, shows the old style of the Ming dinasty, with all wooden elements, including the delicate bracket-sets lined on the periphery, colorfully painted. The view of the Rear Mihrab Hall from the somber worship hall with few windows gives a mystic impression.

The most interesting part of the Northern Great Mosque of Qinyang is the Rear Mihrab Hall, built of brick. It is connected with the wooden worship hall by three continual semicircular arches in a brick wall, from which two thick arches go to the Qibla wall, dividing the Rear Mihab Hall into three bays. Each bay is surmounted with a high dome, the exterior of which is crowned with a brilliant elaborate roof with enameled tiles.
The interior of the Rear Mihrab hall is made up in a quite logical and perspicuous way without any major faults, though with a somewhat archaic impression.

 

The symbolic exterior formation of its three towers, with the central one higher than those to each side, resembles the Rear Mihrab Hall of the mosque of Changzhou, though the latter was made of wood and functions also as lighting towers in difference to the former. Qinyang’s crossed gambrel roofs are much more flamboyant than the latter both in form and color. However one can hardly get the full view of this roof formation from outside unless one goes up onto a rooftop of a neighboring building. Then why was it made so monumental and artistic, at such a large cost in terms of finance and labor?
It appears to be close to Indian ‘sculptural architecture’, deviating from the principles of genuine Islamic architecture, which is more membranous, emphasizing interior spaces more than its external appearance.

It is supposed, due to the ignorance of its original appearance in the Ming era, that this Rear Mihrab Hall itself was the whole mosque at the initial stage, and the eastern wooden worship hall was added later in stages. If so, this elaborate roof formation could have been seen in conspicuously from the front in previous times, filling a symbolic role as in Indian sculptural architecture.
Granting it to be so, there might have been a small worship hall or front building from the outset, since the height of the Rear Mihrab Hall is still too great. This might be an example of enlargement to the front instead of to the rear as is usual.

 

Zhengzhou is the capital city of Henan Province, with a population of 2.5 million. While it is now an industrial city, it has been designated as one of the National Historical and Cultural Cities, with a long history of 3,500 years. There is a plan to construct a new town to the east of its old area, with a population of a half million, designed by the Japanese architect, Kisho Kurokaka.

The oldest among many mosques in the city is the Northern Great Mosque, located in a quiet Hui area distant from grand avenues, despite being in the heart of the city. Its precincts are quite extensive, with facilities arranged in four parallel lines. The central one on the east-west axis is the Qingzhen Si (mosque), and then on its northern neighboring line are annexes such as a ritual washroom, on its southern line is the Zhengzhou School of Islam (madrasa), and further south is the Women’s Mosque. In addition, a new grand building for various purposes is to be constructed.
Since the Northern Great Mosque is in a pure Chinese style, the new building does not replicate a western domed roof, but intends to modernize traditional Chinese inland style. However, if its tiled roof is only added as a decoration without any relation with its interior space, there would be no difference from a dome as a decoration.

There is a belief that the first construction of the Northern Great Mosque of Zhengzhou was in the age of the Tang dinasty, but this has no warrants. A more reliable theory is that the mosque was fist built in the Ming era and rebuilt in 1759 in the Qing era. It is said to have been considerably demolished through the Cultural Revolution, but by the restoration of the Great Hall, Moon Watching Tower, and Great Gate since 1983, it has recovered its former elegance.

It is located on Qingzhen Street branched to the north from Dram Pavilion Avenue. Its plan forms, as usual, the typical ‘Siheyuan’ type, arranging the Great Gate, first courtyard, second gate-cum-Bangke Tower, second courtyard, northern and southern lecture halls, and Great Hall in a line on the main axis.

Though small, the most conspicuous item, the Bangke Tower (Moon Watching tower), is supposed to have been erected in the Ming era, with two side brick gates, one on each side. Its gambrel roof, supported by a line of fully colored brackets, displays a gorgeous formation, showing a line of animal figures on each ridge. Its first story, which has a richly painted interior, is made of brick surrounded with stone columns, over which is the wooden second story.

The Great Hall covers an area of about 500 square meters, composed of a triptych of the front rolled-shed roof building, the worship hall, and the Rear Mihrab Hall. The front building has a stone portico, reflecting the same in the opposite Bangke Tower. The worship hall consists of two parallel buildings, each of which has white colored beams with delicate foliage paintings and, though a bit unbalanced, vermilion colored columns. With subtle craftsmanship all the purlins are doubly piled, each of which has a bracket-set to support the rafters.

The wooden Rear Mihrab Hall is not an extension of the worship hall but an independent building, separated from the worship hall by a delicately carved ‘Huazhao’ (permeable flower screen).
On the whole, it can be said to be a slightly punch-lacking medium sized mosque, in spite of its elaborate workmanship.

 

The city of Kaifeng has been inhabited since the Spring and Autumn period before the Common Era and was the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty in the 11th century. It is located in what is now Henan Province, 70km east from Zhengzhou, having been the capital of the province till the time when the capital was moved to Zhengzhou in 1954 during the reign of the Republic of China. As a historical smallish city with a population of 800,000 it is designated as one of the six historical great cities of China (the others being Xian, Luoyang, Beijing, Nanjing, and Hangzhou).

Kaifeng was a great international trading city in the Northern Song era, in the last period of which many Muslims came to live for commerce and even a Jewish community existed from the Song era to the 19th century. Since Jews were apt to be confused with Muslims, Jewish Synagogues were sometimes named ‘Qingzhen Si’ (Pure and True Temple) like mosques. Though there are no extant synagogues in Kaifeng, it is said that there were three mosques in the Song era, and 14 mosques are scattered across the city nowadays.

The Eastern Great Mosque is also called the Eastern Hui Mosque or simply Eastern Mosque, while its old name in the Ming era was the Great Liang Mosque (Great Liang was the city’s ancient name when it was the capital of Wei during the Age of the Warring States). Its original location was outside the Song Gate on the east and it was relocated to the current spot in the Ming era, though the exact time is unknown. The year of its first construction is also unknown, but there are inscriptions that say it was reconstructed in 1407, the fourth year of the early Yongle period during the Ming era, and heavily repaired in 1846, the 26th year of Daoguang period during the Qing era. Recently, it has been thoroughly repaired after the Cultural Revolution since1989.

Its site is to the north of Drum Pavilion Avenue, located along the market street of Hui people’s foods (former Qingzhen Street), thanks to which it was not affected by the widening of the avenue, so, in spite of being the largest mosque in the Henan Province it still enjoys a quiet environment. This front street is conveniently on the east, with the facilities in the layout of three continuous divisions on the main axis from east to west. Both the front yard and main courtyard are quite spacious.

The Great Gate consists of five spans in width, in front of which was a large Zhaobi (mirror wall), now lost. The southern and northern buildings of the front yard, used as the Elementary School of Mingde in the early years of the Republic of China, are now utilized for the Martial Arts Studio of the Eastern Great Mosque. Those buildings are surrounded with colonnades. When I visited in 2007, the extensive first division was not yet made up as a garden, but was used as a playground for neighboring children.

 

The second gate, simpler than the Great Gate, is three-span wide. The wall stretching from this gate firmly separates this division from the next, differing from Xian’s Huajuexiang Mosque in which many gardens continue leisurely without sharp partition. The gate has fine sub gates on both sides, in which are painted landscapes as a paradise.

The second division also has many buildings to the north and south of the extensive courtyard, such as lecture halls, a ritual washing room, a house for the Imam, and the Ahong’s library. The Moon watching tower has been lost, and the lack of a Bangke Tower is unsatisfactory for such a large mosque.
As if to compensate for this, at the foreground of the Great Hall is an agreeable terrace (Moon platform) paved of stone and encircled with stone balustrades. The scenery like this terrace with surrounding greenery and other buildings’ roofs covered with green enameled tiles on the background is usually only seen in large-scale mosques like those of Guangzhou and Xian.
They display unique courtyards, quite different from those in Middle Eastern mosques. However, I wonder why the idea to set up a water basin or a fountain at the center of a Moon platform did not occur to the Chinese architects.

Since it is said that a front hall was added to the Great Hall in 1846, or the 26th year of Daoguang’s reign during the Qing era, the Moon platform must have been made after that. The front hall is quite spacious, with five spans in its width, the same as in the Great Hall, and also deep.
Although the Great Hall consists of two parallel buildings, the interior space is not separated but continuous in one. In contrast with the Zhengzhou mosque, the Eastern Great Mosque of Kaifeng does not have an independent Rear Mihrab Hall but only a niche as the Mihrab in the Qibla wall. This worship room is a grand hypostyle hall of 20m wide and 40m long, made in simplicity and fortitude with few decorations. Except for the white walls, the color scheme of this interior is unified into one, reddish ocher, giving an impression of austerity.

However, the surroundings of the Mihrab are brilliantly ornamented with Arabic calligraphy, green enameled tiles, and so on. It is unique to make the Mihrab an edifice-like form, capping a tiled roof edge over the upper wall.
The Great Hall is surmounted with a gambrel roof, the gable of which is walled up. Its floor area exceeds 700 square meters, having moreover a wing on either side.

Behind the Great Hall is the third division (Rear division) where there was a women’s mosque before, which has now moved to the opposite side of the front street under the name of the Qinzhen Girls’ School of Kaifeng. As the Northern Great Mosque is eager in education, it also operated, in the Rear division, a primary and secondary school and a Madrasa for religious training.

(01/10/2009)