Why I built an AI Map for Ancient Architecture

I’m always fond of exploring places where time got encapsulated, where you wander into a rural village nobody recommends and find a preserved temple hall standing quietly behind a primary school.

Traditional Chinese architecture has held me since childhood. Living in a city dominated by Soviet-style architecture and unregulated brick-and-cement housing, the surviving architecture from the previous generation holds some magical tension against the monochrome city fabric. There were stories behind the preservation of that building, the regret of how some got demolished without a trace, the narrative sealed inside the physical site that can only be told through the remaining steles.

(Left) Zhihua Temple, Dongcheng, Beijing, embedded in the ancient city fabric right next to Zaha Hadid’s Galaxy SOHO | (Right) Thousand-Buddha niche (千佛龛) in the temple main hall

When China named its first batch of national key cultural heritage sites in 1961, preservation was the least priority for the whole society. Heritage carried no merit but carried sin. An old temple was superstition. An old mansion was a landlord’s crime. The safest thing an old building could do was make itself useful, become a granary, a school, a warehouse, a factory. Even the Forbidden City was once proposed to be demolished leaving only the main hall. Only lately has that turned around. Decades of heritage/relics surveys rediscover the sites and start preserving them from the fate of eventual decay. But the process is rather slow and sometimes controversial.

(Left) Qingjing Mosque, Quanzhou, Fujian, one of the earliest mosques in China | (Right) Iwan of the mosque

When I first wrote about Chinese cultural heritage last September, I found a wide gap between what I regularly visit and what people coming to China usually see. There’s a major barrier due to language and a lack of information. The most famous sites are not only the classical ones, but also the most calibrated, like theme parks with similar stories and…