Timber construction of vernacular buildings in Hong Kong

Located along the southern coast of China, Hong Kong possesses a large number of buildings erected between the 17(th) and early 20(th) centuries in the style of Pearl River Delta vernacular architecture. These buildings come in different scales and of different building types. In a village, it is common to see large ancestral halls with a complicated timber structural system at one end of the scale as well as common houses with simple construction at the other end of the scale. There are also temples erected in locations away from the villages serving the fishing and merchant communities. Monumental architecture in traditional China followed a well defined modular system in determining sizing of structural members, spatial composition and constructional method. Was there a similar modular system adopted in vernacular buildings in Hong Kong? This paper seeks a structural understanding of the construction of vernacular architecture in Hong Kong by comparing between the building types, sites, and scales. It will suggest a system for analyzing the timber structural system and the construction of vernacular architecture in Hong Kong.