Roofs Across Asia: Ten Building Traditions from Sri Lanka to the Philippines

Start in Sri Lanka, where building spans the Anuradhapura kingdom, 377 BC to 1017 AD, through Kandy, 1469 to 1815. Buddhism, brought to the island in the third century BC, shaped most of it, including more than twenty five distinct styles of monastery, the stupas of Jetavanaramaya and Ruwanvelisaya, and the rock palace of Sigiriya.

Korean buildings stand on raised stone subfoundations and carry gently curved tile roofs on post and beam frames, with a bracket system that grew more elaborate to support deep eaves. Bulguksa, Seokguram and Seoul's Namdaemun Gate show how Buddhism and Confucianism favored simplicity and avoided extremes.

Japan's tradition is defined by raised wooden construction under tile or thatch, and above all by kigumi joinery, interlocking joints that hold a frame together without nails, screws or adhesive. UNESCO recognized the carpentry skills behind it, known as kumiki, as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2020.

On the cold, arid, high Tibetan plateau, builders used local stone, clay and wood. Temples called gompas and reliquary stupas called chortens are the two main religious forms, and chorten walls run from rounded in Kham to square and four-sided in Ladakh.

Okinawa's houses began as pit dwellings in the Shell Mound Period, roughly 2000 to 1000 BC, and later became pillar-supported halls with red roof tiles baked from local black muddy soil. The tiles were reserved for aristocrats until the Shuri government ended that restriction in 1889, and stone-walled gusuku castles stand across the islands.

Under the Mughal Empire, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Persian, Islamic and Indian traditions fused into an imperial idiom of bulbous domes, slender minarets, white marble inlaid by the pietra dura technique, and the charbagh garden. The Taj Mahal, commissioned in 1632 and completed around 1653, is its best known monument.

British architects of the Raj took Western Gothic Revival and Neoclassical plans and dressed them in Mughal-derived onion domes, chhatri kiosks and pierced jali screens. Chepauk Palace in Madras, completed in 1768, is often called the earliest example, and construction peaked between 1880 and 1947.

In the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, builders from the middle of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth adapted the French neoclassical Empire style to the tropics. The result is known in Dutch as Indisch Rijksstijl.

In the Philippines under Spanish rule, 1565 to 1898, the bahay na bato, or stone house, set a wooden upper frame in thick stone or brick walls. Its ground floor, the silong, held storage and workshops, while capiz-shell sliding windows lit the family quarters above, a design suited to typhoons and earthquakes.

End on the street, where the shophouse serves as residence and business at once, opening onto the pavement in a terraced row, often behind arcades or colonnades. The term came into common use from the 1950s, and cousins include the tong lau of southern China, Hong Kong and Macau.