China possesses a long continuous architectural history, and architecture plays a distinctive role in Chinese civilisation itself, in which the concept of architecture and the way of construction are entirely different from those in the West. In the field of architectural history, a specialist study by a variety of distinguished scholars, both Chinese and non-Chinese, covered the style and aesthetics of Chinese architecture that has been recognised as timelessness and unchanging quality. The architectural diversity and variation, and technological innovation and evolution of Chinese architecture have largely been ignored. This book presents a thematic discussion of architectural history and a critical evaluation of city planning, with a focus on the issues of ideas, methods and techniques in the context of the culture, politics and religion of the pre-modern China. In the book, Qinghua Guo establishes a broad periodisation for the architectural formation and development with a clear conceptual framework for it, and interprets its architectonics and typology in details. This study attempts to identify major characters of Chinese architecture and planning in order to understand how they were formed and why.