ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the craftsmen around the woven arch bridges in the mountains of Southeast China: their technique pedigree, their working and living conditions and their relationship with the local society.
The chapter starts with four dramatic stories of historical bridges: these are either extracted from genealogy books and other forms of local literature, and/or pieced together from information provided by the carpenters themselves. The stories offer us insights into the relationship between the leading carpenter groups: their living conditions in the past, how a group of carpenters was formed by alliances, how they learned or even “stole” knowledge from others, how the different groups competed with each other for projects, how the dangerous construction work was carried out and how they succeeded or failed.
By comparing the detailed building technique of different carpenter groups and a large number of surviving historical structures, including various “untypical” structures built by anonymous carpenters, this chapter puts forward a theory for the technical pedigree. This is done by revealing the constitution of the bridge-building knowledge and skills, the inherited-technique approaches and the mode of technique dissemination.
