Why do most of our ancient buildings use wood structures rather than stone?

Compared with the Western ancient architecture, Chinese ancient architecture in the choice of materials in favor of wood, a few years ago has been so, and to wood frame structure. This structural method, composed of columns, beams and purlins and other major components. The joints between the members are combined with mortise and tenon joints to form a flexible frame. This form of mortise and tenon combination has been found in the primitive society building site of Hemudu in Yuyao, Zhejiang Province, indicating that it has been formed more than 7,000 years ago. In ancient China, there are three main forms of wooden structures. First, the well dry type, that is, with round or square wood overlapping structure on all sides such as well, this is one of the most primitive and simple structure, now in addition to the mountainous areas outside the woodland, has rarely seen. The second is "through the bucket type", is to use through the square, the column phase through the bucket into, easy to construct, the most seismic, but it is more difficult to build a large form of the temple and pavilion, so China's southern residential and smaller halls and pavilions more in this form. Third, "lifting beam type" (also known as stacked beam), that is, lifting the beam on the column, beam on the column (short column), columns and lifting the beam of the structure. This structure is characterized by the width and depth of the building to meet the requirements of the expansion of interior space into a large palace, altar temples, temples, royal residences, mansions and other luxury and magnificent buildings to take the main structural form. Some buildings also used a combination of lifting beams and wear bucket form, more flexible and diverse

Because of the timber construction of beam-column structure, is an elastic framework, which makes it also has an outstanding advantage of strong seismic performance. It can dissipate huge vibration energy into highly elastic nodes. This is extremely favorable for earthquake-prone China. Therefore, there are many built in the hard-hit earthquake area of the wooden building, thousands of years still well-preserved. For example, like the Liao Dynasty Wooden Pagoda in Ying County, Shanxi, which is more than 67 meters high, the tallest existing wooden pagoda in the world, and the Liao Dynasty Guanyin Pavilion of the Dule Temple in Jixian County, Tianjin, which is as high as 23 meters high, the wooden structures have been in place for nearly a thousand years or more than 1,000 years. The latter had experienced in the vicinity of the occurrence of more than eight major earthquakes, and in 1976 by the impact of the Tangshan earthquake, but also unharmed, fully demonstrated the superiority of the seismic performance of this structural system. This is one of the characteristics of ancient Chinese architecture.