(Photo source: Baidu.com)

A GERMAN historian said in Beijing last week that adobe beds - kang in pinyin - played a significant role in shaping ancient Chinese cultural etiquette.

Mareile Flitsch, a professor at Berlin Technical University's Institute for History of Technology, said that the Chinese adobe bed, also a hypocaust, had one side cold and one side warm. They served multiple living functions, being used as beds, chairs, kitchens and dining tables, as well as being used as ritual sites, such as when monks held mourning services and couples carried out their wedding ceremonies.

In all cases, different sitting or kneeling postures might show different social ranks, Flitsch said. She noted that the use of the kang involved the sitting postures of kneeling, squatting and sitting cross-legged; and that sitting in the correct postures and the right place subtly exposed politeness and social rank.

The kang was usually covered with a mat on which people sat; many Chinese historians have also investigated rules of etiquette concerning the correct use of mats and of furnishing, she said.

Flitsch said many wealthy people in North China slowly abandoned the kang at the end of 19th century - and instead began to use modern tables, chairs and beds.

But many kang can still be found in rural China at present. No Chinese historians have so far made any comment on Flitsch's conclusion.

Editor: Wing