Pursuit of heritage

Exposed to the dense ancient temples and pagodas in his hometown since childhood, Liu has been predisposed to the charm of traditional Chinese architecture.

After completing his studies in fine arts at Taiyuan Normal University in Shanxi in 2004, he worked in design and engineering management at a company in Kunshan, Jiangsu province, for over a decade, eventually getting promoted to head of project management in Vietnam.

While gaining financial stability, Liu felt a sense of emptiness and a sporadic desire to pursue culture and art.

"Every day was a haze — the hum of machinery and the constant presence of construction workers — it was stifling," he recalls, adding that reality veered far from what he envisioned for himself.

In 2012, he quit his job and started exploring opportunities for a different career.

He found inspiration at the end of the year when he visited a museum in Shanghai and was immediately drawn to a model of an ancient Chinese building.

"I thought of my roots," he says.

"I realized that such beauty shouldn't be locked behind glass — it should be touched, interacted with, and enjoyed," he adds.

That was when he came up with the idea of mortise-and-tenon building blocks. Liu started digging into books on ancient buildings and visiting them to study their details.

He made countless visits to Foguang Temple on Shanxi's Mount Wutai, a Tang Dynasty (618-907) masterpiece of architecture, and photographed, measured and documented its details.

"The surveying and mapping took over a year," he says.

He had to precisely determine the position and dimensions of every component of the traditional wooden brackets.

This precision allows him to balance the structure between the brackets, columns and beams.

Through various experiments, he built a 1:20 scale model of the eastern main hall of Foguang Temple, complete with interlocking dougong brackets, roof tiles and tiny beasts on the eaves.

"This is a way to pay tribute to the ancient craftsmen and their architectural artistry," he says.

To make the blocks, the trick is to dissect the mortise-and-tenon structure and maintain its external consistency when scaling it down.

"Transforming a 30-centimeter-thick column into a 1-centimeter version requires subtle design adjustments. The challenge lies in ensuring that these miniaturized components can still fit together seamlessly and be disassembled, which is no easy feat. It tests the limits of manufacturing precision. My goal is to create a desktop toy that faithfully replicates the interior and exterior of the original structure," he says.

As a building toy, its playability — the flexibility of disassembling and reassembling the components of the dougong model — poses another challenge to Liu.

The more detachable the components, the stronger the model's playability and the more advanced the underlying technology must be.

"When we first created dougong building blocks, many parts couldn't be disassembled, and there were still many flaws," Liu says.

He eventually overcame the problem by consulting with artisans who built old-fashioned village houses.

Through trial and error, Liu produced dozens of sets of blocks in 2013, all of which were quickly snatched up online.

"It was encouraging," he says.