The Chinese pavilion (called ting in Chinese) is a very common sight in the country, for you can notice such buildings almost in every city. Sometimes, even in a tiny garden covering no more than one hundred square meters, there might be a fancy one as well.
Normally built of wood, bamboo or stone, pavilions can be in any of such plane figures as triangle, square, hexagonal, octagonal, a shape of five-petal flower or a fan. No matter how they look like, however, all of them have one thing in common: there are no walls to support the roof, only columns. This unique feature is, actually, how the Chinese pavilion is defined.
In ancient times, pavilions served various purposes, without mentioning those luxurious ones for entertaining the upper class in imperial or private gardens. A wayside liang ting, (cooling pavilion) could provide weary trekkers with a place for rest and shelter them from the vigor-consuming heat in summer.
Some pavilions, however, were erected to protect such important memorials recording certain historical events or commemorating some outstanding figures. Since most of the memorials are stone tablets engraved with words, this kind of pavilion is often called bei ting (stele pavilion) in Chinese.
Ocassionally, you might find a pavilion over a water well, with a dormer window in its roof. The pavilion was, no doubt, to keep the well water clean, but how about the window? Ancient Chinese always believed that water untouched by sunlight was not purified, and would cause diseases, so they built such a dormer window to allow the sun to cast its rays into the well.
Nowadays, the purposes of pavilions have become much more simple. Part of the landscape, they also make a nice place for tourists to take a rest and snap pictures.
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