There was no cement in ancient China, so what did the ancients use to build walls?

There was no cement in ancient China, so what did the ancients use to build walls? The earliest building adhesive found in our country is white ash rammed earth.

This material can play a major reinforcing role, but rain, wind, and humidity can affect its solidification. The degree of solidity is one star. Later, the ancients used a mixture of yellow mud, water and straw.

This adhesive is more common in our country. In other words, the earthen walls of the thatched houses of the common people are mostly made of this yellow mud and straw. This method will also be gradually destroyed with the erosion of wind and rain, and the degree of solidity is two-star.

In ancient times, the rich and noble families used white lime to build houses, that is, to soak lime and water for about a month, and then use it after the lime is soaked. This adhesive was still used after liberation.

<> mortise and tenon structure. The most representative of the Forbidden City is the Forbidden City.

The so-called mortise and tenon structure means that there is no need for adhesives, nails, or any auxiliary reinforcement tools in construction. Every piece of wood used to build the house is connected to each other to strengthen the house. from primitive clan society"Fu Shi on the clamping of the slab floor.

From the rammed earth of slabs to the lime mortar widely used in the Qin and Han dynasties, the bonding technology of ancient building materials has been continuously improved in the production practice of working people. According to the research and investigation of experts, the Ming city wall of Nanjing was discovered.

At the beginning of the construction, the use of different materials was taken into account. Tamped with crushed stone, bricks and loess, this rammed earth and bricks are strong enough to withstand artillery fire.

People use"adhesives"With extraordinary results. In "Heavenly Creation".

There is such a record in . "One point of ash is divided into river sand, two points of loess, glutinous rice, sheep peach.

Rattan juice and it, even, firm and not broken. It is called triad.

Triad soil"It is made from glutinous rice juice, sheep peach vine juice, etc"Super adhesive"。It has high strength and good toughness. compared to today's concrete. Zhu Yuanzhang.

It was so hard to bring in the best materials from all over the country and invite so many craftsmen. Naturally, some people want to profit from them and exchange them for some bargains. In order to prevent this phenomenon, the imperial court required all responsible personnel to be responsible for their own work.

There are names left on the bricks, so often there will be the names of brick kilns, brick makers, inspectors, etc., densely packed with different fonts. Once something goes wrong with the bricks, the person who wrote the name shouldn't be the same person. If you want to run, under this system, there will never be"Tofu residue project"。

Before there was no cement, ordinary people generally used yellow mud, after rolling the yellow mud finely, adding water and stepping on it repeatedly, in the process of constantly adding a small section of grass, this process is called hot mud, hot mud can be used for filling and bonding between stones, the strength is not as good as cement, but the material is taken on the spot, the cost is low, it can also be made of adobe, for building walls.

For the rich people, they use quicklime and water to refine lime powder, dig a big pit on the ground, pave the bluestone slab, soak the lime and hemp knife (processed with hemp skin) in water, called draining ash, generally soak for about a month, this ash is used to build a blue brick wall, the strength of the plastering wall is very good, and most of the houses of the Qing Dynasty that are preserved now are this kind of process.

The ancients generally took seven steps to build a house:

The first step is to copy the flat line.

This is the most basic thing to build a house, that is, to measure the flatness of the ground with special instruments such as a level, and to observe whether the object is on the same horizontal plane, that is, the elevation is the same.

Step 2 – Excavation of the trench foundation.

That is, the excavation of the soil body to form a space below the ground is required to bury the building foundation, similar to a trench.

Step 3 - Build the foundation.

That is, we often call laying the foundation.

Step 4 – Place the capstone.

Ancient Chinese architecture has always paid attention to "the house does not collapse", which is mainly because the wooden pillars that support the house play the most important load-bearing role, therefore, these pillar capstones can make the large wooden pillars standing on it more stable on the one hand, and at the same time prevent the wooden pillars from directly touching the ground from moisture.

Step 5 - Wrap Taiming.

Ancient houses, especially palace buildings, were built on pedestals, such as the three major halls of the Forbidden City, and the edge of the pedestal was called "Taiming".

Step 6 – Rafter placement.

After the foundation was laid and the pillars were erected, the next step was to spend time on the body and roof of the house, and to place various pillars, rafters, purlins, etc. The basic structure of such a house is considered complete.

Step 7 - Spread tiles on the back of the felt.

The last step is to lay tiles on the roof so that the entire roof can be filled out and protected from the wind and rain.

It looks like it's glued with rice and something, but it's strong.

Glutinous rice mortar was the most important material for building houses and other projects in ancient times, and its quality was also very high, not inferior to today's technology for building houses, but with the advancement of technology, the use of glutinous rice mortar is not suitable for today。At the same time, because of the age, this technology is gradually not well-known, and every time you use it, you need a lot of glutinous rice, for people glutinous rice is food, and the use of concrete today avoids the result of wasting food, and the technology is also very high.

China's ancient architecture is a brilliant stroke in the history of architecture. The ancients took materials from the objects around them, and perfectly integrated earth and wood, so that the building file had its own soul.

There are a large number of dry-column buildings at the Hemudu site, which refer to the houses built above the ground on the bottom frame of wooden (bamboo) columns. The earliest "mortise and tenon" structure in our country was also found here. "Tongzhi Three Emperors" records:

At the beginning of the period, the ancestors lived in the wilderness, and the sage taught the nest to avoid the harm of insects and pigs, and the fact of eating herbs and trees, hence the name'There is a nest', also said'Big Nest'。"There is a Chao clan who teaches people to build houses on trees, and the dry-bar building is similar to this.

Some houses are made of wood, and the basic shape of the house is built with wood, and then covered with earth, which is called "wood-bone mud wall".

The beam-lifting wooden frame is a column on the roof foundation, a beam on the column, a short column on the beam, a beam on the beam, and then a beam on it, and the two ends of the beam bear the purlin, if it is stacked on top of each other, put the ridge melon column on the top beam ** to bear the ridge purlin. The bucket-type timber frame is made of the columns with a dense column spacing and a thin column diameter directly bearing the purlin, and the columns are not connected by a number of piercing fangs and supporting the eaves with a fang.

"Rammed earth plate building" is the most common wall building technique in ancient architecture. The so-called rammed earth plate building is a building built by ramming the loess with a wooden stick (also known as a ramming pestle) to make it dense and hard. Rammed earth houses were built as early as the Yin Shang era.

The most ancient example of this ramming technology in China is in a place called Baiyingzi in Tangyin County, Henan Province, which is the site of the end of the Neolithic period seven or eight thousand years ago. After the Shang Dynasty, this technology was widely used in various fields, and many large-scale palaces and mausoleums were built with rammed construction technology, especially the rammed earth platform foundation became a necessary general type for buildings.

img p=""Modern buildings are made of reinforced concrete, which seems to be harder than civil engineering, but it lacks a kind of toughness of civil engineering. This kind of resilience is not not in the bones of the ancients, and the characters of nature, hierarchy, moderation, etc., which have been inherited for thousands of years, can be shown one by one in the architecture.

Ancient Chinese ordinary stone buildings were cured with lime as a binder!! Buildings such as the city wall are mixed with hot rice soup and pig's blood as a binder!! Wooden buildings are generally inlaid with tenons!!

The mud building is made of mud bricks or mixed with rice soup and lime, and it has been tamped many times!

Extended information: The first is mirage, which is made from clam shells and oyster shells, so its performance is much better than lime. So in ancient times it was more popular than lime. In the Qin and Han dynasties, the "mirage" that was only used in the construction of palaces and mausoleums in the Zhou Dynasty has been more widely used.

For example, the famous "Qin Straight Road", every inch of the road is built with "mirage". This extensive network of ancient Chinese roads was paved with this ancient version of the "lime" technology. The majestic palaces of the Qin and Han dynasties are more commonly plastered with lime and pig blood ginger stone, which forms a better reinforcement effect with a dark red appearance and has a moisture-proof function.

The second is glutinous rice lime slurry, which first appeared in the period of the Northern and Southern Dynasties in China, this glutinous rice lime slurry was originally added to the lime to add glutinous rice soup for cooking, which is equivalent to the formation of a new type of lime, and its strength is much stronger than ordinary lime. Therefore, in the Qing Dynasty, there were many buildings that were built of glutinous rice lime mortar. The starch component in glutinous rice is very large, so the viscous effect is also very good.

In ancient times, the effect of adding glutinous rice to lime was equivalent to the current concrete, and this material is now reluctant to be used.

The third kind, yellow clay, is actually the yellow mud we played with when we were children, this kind of soil has a characteristic, that is, after drying, it is very firm, although it is not as good as cement, but compared to sand and gravel, it is much better. Even some abandoned houses in the countryside are also made of yellow mud, and some hay is often added to them so that they are not easy to break.

In ancient times, there was no cement, but the ancients were able to build strong walls. As early as the Ming Dynasty, people piled up bluestone bricks and rammed earth, and boiled glutinous rice into soup and mixed it with sand, lime and other materials to make a binder that bonded bluestone bricks and rammed earth, and then built a strong city wall.

Although there was no cement in ancient China, they were as smart as the ancients, and it was not difficult for them to make a binder similar to modern cement. In ancient times, people were not only able to build city walls, but many of the walls they built could stand for hundreds of years or even thousands of years. For example, the Nanjing City Wall, built during the Zhu Yuanzhang period, has been standing for about 600 years.

In ancient China, it was not an easy task to build a city wall, and it took almost 27 years and 270,000 people to build the Nanjing city wall in the Ming Dynasty. From this point of view, it is certainly reasonable that the city walls built by the ancients with a meticulous attitude and a lot of time and energy can stand for a hundred years or even a thousand years.

When the Ming Dynasty built the Nanjing City Wall, the materials used were bluestone bricks and rammed earth. To build a good city wall, the general procedure is to first pile up the processed size of the green bricks according to a certain rule, and then pile the treated rammed earth on top of the green bricks. As a raw material for the binder between green bricks and rammed earth, it needs to be refined separately.

In the production of adhesives, the wise ancients made full use of the viscous properties of glutinous rice. First, the ancients boiled glutinous rice into soup, and then mixed it with sand, lime, etc. to make a binder. This adhesive is a modern cement-like thing.

The city walls built by the ancients with this adhesive are not only strong and tough, but also impermeable, and are not inferior to the current concrete in terms of function. Speaking of which, when it comes to the wisdom of the ancients, it is really admirable.

In ancient times, there was no cement, so how was the Great Wall built? How do you build a wall without cement?

Cement is a common building material, the main raw materials are lime and calcium silicate, cement is generally not used alone in construction, but mixed with sand and gravel to form concrete to use.

Cement was invented by the British in the 18th century, after cement entered China, it was called "foreign ash", and in 1889, the first modern cement factory founded by the Chinese was called "Qixin foreign ash factory".

So before the invention of cement, what did the Chinese use to build houses? Why is it difficult to push the Great Wall without cement? Let's take a closer look at the materials used to build city walls in ancient China.

First: lime mortar.

At a very early age, humans have learned to use lime mortar, and it is not difficult to burn lime, of course, lime mortar, which is made by mixing lime, sand and gravel, is obviously very weak, and it is difficult to build very tall large buildings, and it cannot be used in a humid environment, let alone water. Therefore, people tried various ways to improve the strength of lime mortar, the ancient Romans added volcanic ash to lime mortar, forming what Westerners call "the earliest cement", and at the same time, the Chinese mixed yellow clay in lime mortar to enhance the hardness of the mortar.

In ancient China, there was also a lime material called "mirage" that was used in the construction field, mirage was fired from oyster shells or clam shells, and mirage was superior to lime in terms of performance.

In the works of "Tiangong Kaiwu" and "Wenzhou Fuzhi", mirage is mentioned, and "Tiangong Kaiwu" records: "Where Wen, Taiwan, Fujian, Guanghaihai, and stone are unbearable gray, they are naturally replaced by oysters." Oysters are oysters, mirage is taken from the oysters in the sea calcined, so it is used more in coastal areas, oysters are shellfish organisms, the main component of the shell is calcium carbonate, and the mirage made by calcining the oyster shell is also the original "cement".

Buildings made of steel and concrete.

Second: glutinous rice lime slurry.

In the 6th century AD, that is, when the Northern and Southern Dynasties, there was a building material called glutinous rice lime mortar in China, and the glutinous rice soup was mixed into the lime mortar, forming a new composite mortar, the strength of glutinous rice lime mortar is much greater than that of pure lime mortar, very strong, in the Ming and Qing dynasties of China, there are many brick walls of buildings that are built with glutinous rice lime mortar, which stand tall after a hundred years, such as the Great Wall and the Ming city walls in various places, etc., and some city walls are even harder than modern buildings, It is difficult to knock it down even with a bulldozer.

The starch in glutinous rice is mainly amylopectin, and its composition can reach 95% to 100%, so after the glutinous rice is cooked, it is boiled into glutinous rice soup is very sticky, mixed into lime mortar, which is tantamount to acting as a natural binder, and the strength of glutinous rice lime slurry is no less than that of modern concrete.