This collection contains photographs from the <a href="https://archnet.org/collections/1786" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Aga Khan Visual Archive</a> that depict monuments and landscapes from locations in China.

Joyce Lee

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color slide

Courtyard. Old guest house. Xinjiang.

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Exterior view. Mausoleum site. Xinjiang.

China

Located in a northeastern suburb about five kilometers outside of Kashi (Kashgar), the Apak Khoja Mausoleum is the mausoleum complex of the Khoja family of the Baishan Sect, who ruled this area of Xinjiang, including Khotan, Yarkand, Aksu, Kutcha and Tarim, from the seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century under Qing Chinese suzerainty. This family of religious leaders originally from Bukhara also built the Aitika Mosque in downtown Kashi. The Apak Khoja Complex was founded in the early seventeenth century with a religious school built by Yusuf Khoja, who later also built himself a mausoleum at the site in 1640. With the subsequent addition of several mosques, the complex now covers almost three hectares. It is the largest Islamic complex in the Xinjiang Province and is a major pilgrimage center. The complex has a slightly irregular rectangular plan with a large central garden surrounded by the High and Low Mosques and the main gate to the south, the Great Mosque to the west, the Small Green Mosque to the north and the Mausoleum to the east. Due to the non-orthogonal layout of the complex that responds to the topography of the landscape, all mosques face Mecca at a slightly different angle. The complex is entered from a large masonry gateway at the southeast corner of the complex. This imposing edifice, bordered by two thin engaged columns with cupolas, is covered with blue tiles of various designs. A tile panel with an Arabic inscription surmounts the portal. The recessed doorway bears a second inscriptive panel. This gateway has experienced slight damage from repairs in the 1950s that employed cement that is unresponsive to changes in temperature and humidity, and displays additional damage from the 1978 earthquake. The High and Low Mosques, or the Southern Mosque Connected to the west of the main gateway are the High and Low Mosques, also referred to together as the Southern Mosque. The portico of the High Mosque is accessed via six steps through a brick portal beside the main gate. This outer, hypostyle section of the High Mosque is three bays deep and defined by rows of carved and painted wooden columns. It was built in 1926 to create shaded space for outdoor use in warm weather. The columns are joined with muqarnas capitals to the rafters, which are adorned with painted scenery and floral motifs. Two towers with cupolas, each ringed with decorative brick patterns, mark the edges created by the stone veranda before the portico. The prayer hall, which is entered through two doors at either end of the portico, is two bays deep and was built in 1873. Its qibla wall has arched niches flanking the central mihrab. The brick qibla wall of the High Mosque serves as the eastern wall of the older Low Mosque, which dates from the late eighteenth century. Unlike the High Mosque with its open portico, this mosque has a fully enclosed, long, mud-brick anteroom that runs behind the qibla wall of the High Mosque and precedes the square prayer hall of the Low Mosque. The dome that caps the prayer hall has ribs visible from the exterior. Such a mosque ensemble, an open-sided summer mosque complemented by an enclosed winter mosque, is common in Uyghur religious architecture. Directly to the west of the Low Mosque are the madrasa and the scripture hall enclosing a cloister courtyard. To the south of the complex, outside the Low Mosque, is a tree-lined pool. Mausoleum of Apak Khoja The tallest and largest building of the complex is the mausoleum built in 1640 by Yusuf Khoja for himself. However, the mausoleum is now named after his son Apak Khoja, who became more famous than his father and who was also buried here in 1693. Locally, it is also called the Tomb of Xinagfei of the Tomb of the Perfumed Concubine, with reference to Mahran Khoja, a daughter of Satuk Boghra Khan, who is said to have been one of the favorite consorts of the Qing Emperor. According to most sources, however, she was actually buried in Beijing in 1788. Four heavy engaged towers, capped with low cupolas carried on muqarnas cornices, mark the corners of the square mausoleum and a heavy pishtaq frames its western entrance. The columnless hall measures thirty-nine meters on each side and contains numerous tombs. It is covered by a green-tiled dome sixteen meters in diameter and crowned by a lantern at a height of twenty-four meters above ground. The vaults supporting the dome create four iwans inside the burial hall and a peripheral corridor separates the outer walls of the chamber from the walls of the burial hall. The interior is whitewashed while the exterior faces are partitioned into long arched niches punctured by screened windows and decorated with blue, green and white patterned tiles. Due to replacements over time, many of the tiles covering the mausoleum and its minarets do not match, creating a patchwork effect. Four sets of stairs set inside the corner towers lead up to the roof terrace, protected by a crenelated parapet. The mausoleum is surrounded by a walled graveyard that was in use until quite recently. This cemetery with its vaulted sarcophagi is locally referred to as the "city of the dead". Small Green Mosque To the northwest of the mausoleum is the seventeenth-century Small Green Mosque, used by Apak Khoja for the reading of the Quran. Similar to the Southern Mosque, this mosque has both a portico for use in warmer weather and an enclosed prayer hall for winter use. The wooden hypostyle south-facing portico is four bays deep and three bays wide. The dome of the prayer hall is carried on three nested drums, stepping down from a twenty-four sided drum to a twelve-sided drum, and then to an octagonal drum before resting on the square hall. This dome clad with green tiles mimics that of the mausoleum. A high octagonal lantern surmounts it. Great Mosque On the western side of the complex is the Great Mosque, or the New Western Mosque. This mosque was built in 1873 by Yakub Beg, who served as a general in the Qing army between 1866 and 1877. The Great Mosque has a U-shaped shaped plan. The prayer hall consists of an arcade of low domed bays with heavy squinches that curve around the east-west axis centered on the domed mihrab, similar to the Imin Mosque in Turfan. These three sides embrace the fifteen-bay wide and four bay deep columned portico, with its own exterior central mihrab, decorated with a vibrant polychromatic wood panel. This central hypostyle section bears a flat roof, in contrast to the rhythmic shallow domes of the surrounding prayer hall. The composition is dominated on the exterior by the larger dome marking the mihrab bay and the raised gateways at either end of the arcaded arms. Sources: Chang, Jing Qi. "Islamic Architecture in China." In The Changing Rural Habitat. Volume II: Background Papers, edited by Brian Brace Taylor, 71, 73-74. Singapore: Concept Media, for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, 1982. Herdeg, Klaus. "Religious and Mortuary Complex". In Formal Structure in Islamic Architecture of Iran and Turkestan, 70-71. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1990. Loubes, Jean-Paul. Architecture et Urbanisme de Turfan: Une Oasis du Turkestan Chinois, 149-189. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1998. O'Kane, Bernard. “Iran and Central Asia.” In The mosque: history, architectural development &amp; regional diversity, edited by Martin Frishman and Hasan-Uddin Khan, 136. London : Thames and Hudson, 1994. Qiu, Yulan. Ancient Chinese Architecture: Islamic Buildings, edited by Sun Dazhang, 148-149. Vienna: Springer-Verlag, 2003. Zhang, Jing-qui. "Mosques of Northern China". In MIMAR 3: Architecture in Development. Singapore: Concept Media Ltd, 1982.

Apak Khoja Mausoleum Complex

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Exterior view. Nanliang Mosque. Xinjiang.

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Exterior view. South Gate Mosque. Xinjiang.

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Exterior view. Great Mosque. Xinjiang.

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Interior view. Hui Mosuqe. Xinjiang.

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Tombstone. Mohamed Kashgar Mausoleum. Xinjiang.

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Unidentified building. Xinjiang.

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Exterior view. Hui Mosuqe. Xinjiang.

Aga Khan Visual Archive: China

The Aga Khan Visual Archive (AKVA) is a collection of the&nbsp;<a href="https://libraries.mit.edu/akdc/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Aga Khan Documentation Center</a>, MIT Libraries (AKDC@MIT), that consists of over 120,000 slides and digital images of architecture, urbanism, and the built environment of Muslim societies, donated by students and scholars, affiliated with the&nbsp;<a href="http://akpia.mit.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture</a>&nbsp;at MIT, as well as academics, scholars, cultural institutions, and architects from around the world. The images date from the 1970s through the present, and document historic and contemporary sites in the Islamic world, many of which are not documented elsewhere or have changed significantly since their documentation, either through restoration, renovation, or even destruction. The collection began with the foundation of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT and Harvard, and the concurrent establishment of a documentation center to support the research and teaching of its faculty and students. Students who received&nbsp;<a href="http://akpia.mit.edu/travel-grants" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">travel fellowships</a>&nbsp;from the Aga Khan Program to conduct research agreed to duplicate their slides and donate the duplicate copies to the documentation center. Professors and visiting scholars also donated slides of monuments they had taken. The librarians of the documentation center also occasionally purchased sets of slides to supplement the scope of the material. The slides served as illustrations for lectures, books, and other educational materials produced by AKDC@MIT, and formed the seed collection for the Archnet Digital Library, the predecessor to the current version of Archnet that was established in its first form in the late 1990s. Note that only a small representation of the AKVA's contents are currently cataloged on Archnet. In addition to this collection, further selections from the archive can be found at on <a href="https://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/45936" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">DOME, the online interface</a> for the digital collections of the MIT Libraries. A complete list of the boxes in this collection, some of which is still awaiting digitization, can be found on <a href="https://archivesspace.mit.edu/repositories/5/archival_objects/354501" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MIT ArchivesSpace</a>. AKDC staff are currently working to digitize and catalog more material from this collection. As is the case for all images on Archnet, material from the Aga Khan Visual Archive is freely available for research or educational use. Copyright varies, so for information about reproduction for publication, please contact the Aga Khan Documentation Center at <a href="mailto:akdc@mit.edu" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">akdc@mit.edu</a>. &nbsp;

Aga Khan Visual Archive

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digital graphic

IAA708580

Archnet is a community-powered resource that provides ready access to visual and textual material to facilitate teaching, scholarship, and professional work of high quality.&nbsp;This unparalleled resource continues to grow with both the addition of historic archives and documentation on contemporary trends shaping the built environment today.&nbsp;To better serve you, our user, in the study of art and architecture of Muslim societies, we continue to build our vast collection of sites, publications, images, and videos. To ensure a high level of scholarly content and accuracy in the information provided, we appreciate your expert feedback and, more importantly, your contributions..&nbsp;&nbsp;<ul><li>Please send comments, corrections, commendations, and other feedback to <a href="mailto:archnet@mit.edu" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">archnet@mit.edu</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>If you find sites on Archnet to which you can contribute in compelling and meaningful ways, your generosity is most welcome. If you would be interested in contributing research, publications or other media to Archnet, please contact us using <a href="about:blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">archnet-submission@mit.edu</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>We invite contributions of relevant, previously published, Open Access or copyrighted material for which you are able to grant Archnet a non-exclusive license. Please contact us using <a href="about:blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">archnet-submission@mit.edu</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>We invite the contribution of syllabi, lesson plans, recorded lectures, or other material for our pedagogy project. Please contact us using <a href="about:blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">archnet-submission@mit.edu</a>.&nbsp;</li><li>We welcome the donation of select archives based on our current editorial policies and priorities.&nbsp;If you have a collection you would like to bring to the attention of Archnet's editors, please send an email to: <a href="http://mailto: archnet-submission@mit.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">archnet-submission@mit.edu</a>.</li><li>Occasionally, Archnet editors issue calls for contributions on specific themes or of particular types of material. Follow those on the <a href="https://libraries.mit.edu/akdc/category/contributors/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">website of AKDC@MIT </a>or <a href="https://mailchi.mp/17fc345bbd94/archnetakdc-updates" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">subscribe to our mailing list</a>.</li></ul> The breadth, depth, and quality of Archnet is oachieved through the generosity of numerous institutions and individuals listed on the respective pages throughout the site.&nbsp;We thank you for your generosity!

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Archnet is an Open Access resource, provided to the public to facilitate cultural understanding and excellence in both scholarship and practice. Content from Archnet.org may not be published, displayed, or appropriated for commercial use without the expressed written permission of the copyright holder. Unless otherwise noted, Archnet material is available for instructional, nonprofit use, and personal use on the terms of a <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International</a> (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Please contact Archnet to request permission to use the Archnet.org website and its contents beyond the scope outlined above. High-resolution images may be available by contacting us using <a href="mailto:archnet@mit.edu" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">archnet@mit.edu</a>. The content available on Archnet, including but not limited to information, text, graphics, logos, and multimedia related to the the <a href="https://www.archnet.org/authorities/1903" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Aga Khan Trust for Culture’</a>s programmes, such as the <a href="https://www.archnet.org/collections/54" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Historic Cities Programme</a>, the <a href="https://www.archnet.org/collections/848" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Aga Khan Award for Architecture</a> and the <a href="https://www.archnet.org/collections/132" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Aga Khan Music Programme</a>, may be protected by copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property rights and laws, whether owned by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, its affiliates, or third parties. Unauthorized use, reproduction, distribution, modification, or display of this content is strictly prohibited without the express written permission of the respective copyright or trademark holder. Violation of this prohibition may result in legal penalties.

Terms of use

<h2>ARCHNET FAQ</h2>1. Will ARCHNET work on my device?Archnet works well on the most recent version of any major browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge), either on a mobile device or computer. It may work on older or less common browsers as well. If Archnet fails to work properly on your machine, please let us know about your experience by clicking the blue feedback button at bottom right!2. Will my URLs from earlier versions of Archnet still work?Yes, if they are from the version launched in January 2013. As of October 12, 2021, all URLs from the old Archnet have been redirected to ARCHNET.&nbsp;&nbsp;3. How do I download a/n:&nbsp;<ul><li>image - Select the image you want to download from search results, a site or an authority. The image will open in your browser.&nbsp;Right click to download.&nbsp;For larger, high-resolution copies, see contact us using archnet@mit.edu.&nbsp;</li><li>publication - Open the page for the publication in your browser and click the download button. Reprinting Archnet publications is permissible only for personal use.&nbsp;Please contact us for any other requests.&nbsp;</li><li>site descriptions and metadata - Site descriptions and metadata can be used for any nonprofit or educational organization with appropriate attribution to the authors and Archnet.&nbsp;</li><li>video - Currently video downloads are not possible. If you'd like to use an Archnet video, please contact <a href="mailto:archnet@mit.edu" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">archnet@mit.edu</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</li></ul>See our <a href="https://www.archnet.org/pages/terms" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Terms of Use</a> for information on how you can use Archnnet material.4. Can I contribute material to Archnet?&nbsp;Yes!&nbsp;See our <a href="https://www.archnet.org/pages/contribute" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Contribute</a> page for more information.&nbsp;Calls for specific contributions are also also shared in our social media and on the <a href="https://libraries.mit.edu/akdc/category/contributors/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">web site of the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT</a>.&nbsp;&nbsp;5. What happened to the Archnet Timeline?&nbsp;Timeline has migrated into the ARCHNET NEXT Collections page&nbsp;<a href="https://www.archnet.org/collections/collection_type/3/1" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">as a category</a>. These collections provide short introductions for each period, often offering lists of additional resources at the end of the entry. Only the timeline graphic listing the periods along a chronological axis has not migrated.6. My question isn't here.&nbsp;How can I get help?&nbsp;If your issue is with using Archnet, use the blue Feedback button to alert us to your issue. This will allow you to include a screenshot or recording. Please, also, feel free to contact us at <a href="mailto:archnet@mit.edu" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">archnet@mit.edu</a>We are currently developing the help section of ARCHNET NEXT. In the meantime, please use the blue Feedback button in ARCHNET NEXT to send us feedback or other questions. Contact us at <a href="mailto:archnet@mit.edu" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">archnet@mit.edu</a>.&nbsp;

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Welcome to ARCHNET, an open access, interdisciplinary, intellectual resource focused on the built environment of Muslim societies.Focused on the built environment of Islamic civilizations past and present, we seek to:<ul><li>Facilitate excellence in scholarship and professional work by&nbsp;providing reliable information and ready access&nbsp;to vetted, high-quality textual and multimedia resources&nbsp;focused on architecture, urbanism, environmental and landscape design,&nbsp;heritage&nbsp;conservation, economic and environmental sustainability, community development and resilience in the face of rapid change, and related topics.</li><li>Enable teaching and learning in these domains by providing educators with reliable, effective pedagogical material and teaching aids.&nbsp;</li><li>Serve as a platform through which scholars, practitioners, and institutions can bring their work to new global audiences.&nbsp;</li><li>Promote intercultural understanding and dialogue through reliable, high-quality, peer-reviewed material on the diversity of and pluralism within Muslim societies and the interaction between Islamic and other religious, cultural, and philosophical traditions as it relates to architecture and urbanism.</li><li>Enable easy access to a wide variety of resources via a custom-built, web-based, mobile-friendly platform optimized to minimize financial, infrastructural, linguistic, and other barriers to access.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li></ul>Launched in 2002 after several years of development, ARCHNET is a pioneering digital resource that has proven a reliable authority on the built environment of Muslim societies, past and present.&nbsp;ARCHNET is a partnership between the <a href="https://www.archnet.org/collections/1342" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Aga Khan Documentation Center, MIT Libraries</a> (AKDC@MIT) and the <a href="https://www.archnet.org/authorities/1903" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Aga Khan Trust for Culture</a> (AKTC), with support from the <a href="https://www.archnet.org/collections/50" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture</a> at Harvard and MIT.&nbsp;ARCHNET is developed and maintained by <a href="https://www.performantsoftware.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Performant Software Solutions</a>.

Aga Khan Visual Archive: China

Parent Collections

Aga Khan Visual Archive: China

Images & Videos

Parent Collections