The appearance of Guangyue Building is a pavilion with four double eaves, spanning the ridge and crossing the street. Its overall height and four sides are 33 meters, which was nine feet nine in ancient times. In ancient China, nine was the pole of yang number, which meant that it could not be surpassed. The sacred position of Guangyue Building in Liaocheng people's hearts can be seen from this.
Guangyue Mansion consists of wharf and main building. Among them, the pier is a quadrangular prism made of masonry, with two sides of 30 meters long and a vertical height of 9.38 meters. There are semicircular arches in the east, west, north and south, which are called Taiping, Xing Li, Civilization and Wuding. The east gate is the only way to climb the building. From this door, you can climb fifty-six steps to the table. Set up a shed roof on the terrace to prevent rain from invading. On the countertop, except for the entrance and exit of the stairs in the north, the other three pillars are built with sill walls to rest the king of Wu. The countertop brick is surrounded by a female wall, and there are drainage channels on both sides.
The main building is four floors, built on the dock, with a height of 24 meters.
The ground on the first floor is slightly higher than the countertop, with seven rooms wide and deep. Entering the room on the first floor, you can see many thick red wooden columns. There are 32 such columns in the whole building, but people can only see 12, because the other 20 columns are made of brick walls. The height of these wooden columns is 1 1.58 meters, which runs from the first floor to the third floor. They are a whole wooden column with no break in the middle, so they are also called Tian Tongzhu. This kind of wooden pillar was shipped to Liaocheng from the original Sulu country, which is now the Philippines, via the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, and it is a batch of tribute wood. In the whole building, these wooden columns play a major supporting role. What's even more amazing is that these wooden columns can also prevent fire! It is said that the Japanese army set fire to the building before retreating from Liaocheng in 1945, but the Guangyue building was not seriously damaged in that fire! The wood used to build the Guangyue Building needed special treatment, and then it was painted several times with pig blood and big paint. Therefore, it is difficult to light these logs with fire. The existence of Guangyue Building also benefits from this.
The structural layout of the second floor is generally similar, with seven rooms in width and seven in depth, but there are obvious differences in details. There is Wenchang Pavilion in it, which used to be dedicated to "King Wenchang". There is a "Qianlong Palace" in the pavilion, which is the place where Emperor Qianlong rested when he visited Liaocheng in the south. Go up the west stairs 16 steps to reach the third floor.
The third layer is the dark layer, which is actually the structural layer. There are five rooms in width and depth. It is a transitional layer, which plays the role of connecting the preceding with the following. Here, people can clearly see the "tenon-mortise-tenon-mortise" structure of Guangyue Building. Thirty-two pillars are all straight from bottom to top. There are some wooden beams around the upper end of the column, which are divided into inner and outer grooves with a certain distance between them, but people can only see the inner groove. Above the beam Fang, you can also see a component called a bucket arch, which looks like a faucet. These bucket arches are load-bearing members-they first transfer the pressure on the lower columns layer by layer, and then decompose the pressure on the upper floors layer by layer, so that the forces in the upper and lower directions can be balanced. There are more than 200 small bucket arches under the eaves outside the big bucket arch, and the inner and outer parts of the bucket arch are connected together, which can decompose and transfer the internal and external forces layer by layer, so that the internal and external forces can reach a balance. It can be seen that Liaocheng people in the early Ming Dynasty have thoroughly studied mechanics.
The fourth floor is the top floor of Guangyue Building, with three rooms wide and deep. The plane is square, but suddenly it is smaller than the lower floors, and the structure is relatively simple. There are four watchtowers on the fourth floor, where the Ming army observes the enemy's situation. From these four observation ports, you can see the panorama of Liaocheng ancient city. The roof on the fourth floor is very beautiful, a huge woodcut lotus, surrounded by lotus, lotus leaf and lotus seed. Its scientific name is "algae well", also called "lotus well". The ancients carved lotus flowers on the roof with a deep intention: pavilions are wooden pavilions, and the most feared thing is fire. At that time, the ancients had a sense of fire prevention, so they carved the mascot in the water on the roof to play a warning role and remind themselves that they must prevent fire. Lotus grows in water, which means that the roof is a water seat. The ancients skillfully used this five-element principle to suppress the pavilion and bring peace to it.
The architectural structure of Guangyue Building is roughly like this.