Building Techniques,Management System,and National Wisdom Reflected by the Colors of the Great Wall
Incomparable to some colorful architectural heritages,including palaces,temples,and grottoes,the Great Wall does not stand out for the colorfulness of its building materials.There is even a terminology coined after the Great Wall:"Great Wall Grey",which solidifies the color characteristics of the Great Wall.Spanning across a vast land in northern China with various geo-graphical features,the Great Wall was built with all kinds of locally sourced materials,including stone materials with significantly dif-ferent natural colors.However,there are only case studies on the compositions of the materials used by certain parts of the Great Wall.Based on the colors of the stone materials used by the Great Wall,a color survey was conducted across the best-preserved Ming Great Wall for statistical and quantitative analyses.Mask R-CNN and K-means algorithms are introduced into this study to extract the main colors of different building materials from two million images taken across the Great Wall and generate a color map for the entire Great Wall.For segments of significant importance,images were taken twice and color calibrations were carried out accord-ingly,based on which,the most colorful wall of the entire Great Wall and color-matching patterns of the watchtowers were identified.Electronic microscope and X-ray spectrometry were conducted on the colorful stone material samples taken from the Great Wall.It is found that sedimentary rock which has consistent color and fine particles of similar sizes is often used to build the lower part of the stone wall of hollow watchtowers;and igneous rock which contains large crystals of various sizes is often used for multi-colored walls with patterns.Therefore,it is reasoned that as the ancient Chinese had already mastered the physical properties of different ma-terials,they intentionally chose high-quality sedimentary rocks and carefully processed them into slabs to build watchtowers of more complicated designs which required higher building standards,while they roughly processed raw stone materials which are difficult to work with to build walls with patterns.As far as the causes for different colors are concerned,the colors of different stone materials are linked to various metal ions of different valences and contents.From the perspective of historical literature,strict standards were formulated for the side wall quality of the Great Wall and established the basis for colorful walls.Military commanders of the Ming Dynasty,including Qi Jiguang and Tan Lun,improved the building quality and standards for the Great Wall through clear rewarding and punitive measures.To serve the military purpose of intimidating potential enemies is also one of the reasons for building the grand and orderly colored walls.Besides filling the gaps in research relating to the colors of traditional buildings,this paper tried to re-establish the historical scenes when the Great Wall was built,reviewed the artistic pursuit of ancient builders and craftsmen,and the rigorous attitude dem-onstrated by the supervisors managing the construction the Great Wall when they formulated the standards for building qualities.This paper reveals the pinnacle of colored artwork reached by the Great Wall.The colorful stone material samples taken from the Great Wall can also be used for exhibitions at the Great Wall Museum.The colorful segments of the Great Wall discovered through this pa-per can be utilized to facilitate the development of some undeveloped regions into tourist attractions so that the geographical environ-ment,natural landscape,and the Great Wall can be all linked together as tourist attractions.
the Great Wallbuilding colorcolor mapartificial intelligencelocally sourced material
万方数据
维普
