Makers › Engineer / Architect
Li Jie
Northern Song director of the Directorate of Construction who compiled the Yingzao fashi, the state building manual printed in 1103
A stone arch bridge is being built across a river gorge, with wooden centering under the arch and bamboo scaffolding around the piers; many small workers haul stone blocks up a ramp with ropes and pulleys, and blocks and logs lie in the foreground below a distant city wall.
Also known as Zi Mingzhong
Li Jie, courtesy name Mingzhong, came from Guancheng in Zhengzhou; his father Li Nangong rose to minister of revenue. Entering office through his father's privilege, he joined the Directorate of Construction in 1092 and over more than a decade rose from registrar to its director, overseeing works such as the residences of five princes, the Imperial Academy, the Department of State Affairs, the Longde Palace, the Zhuque Gate and the Ancestral Temple. In 1097 he was ordered to revise the *Treatise on Architectural Methods* (*Yingzao fashi*); drawing on older texts and on interviews with craftsmen, he finished it in 1100, and it was printed in 1103 in thirty-four chapters covering terms, standards, labour, materials and drawings. He died in office as prefect of Guozhou in early 1110, and Cheng Ju wrote his epitaph. Zhu Qiqian found a manuscript copy in Nanjing in 1919, and Liang Sicheng later built his study of Song architecture on it.
Life and times
Dates Birth unknown–1110 CE