铺地

I was very excited a while back when I was reading Guo Qinghua's Visual Dictionary of Chinese Architecture and came across the term pudi (铺地). It was just the word I'd spent years (desultorily) looking for. In China, I often find myself photographing the walkways in gardens--they're inlaid with tiny stones, pottery shards and bricks in a seemingly infinite variety of patterns. I probably spend as much time looking at the ground as at the architecture and plantings.  The sections never lasted for long, they changed as frequently as the view around them changed.

Ji Cheng 计成 devotes a section in his Yuanye 园冶 to pudi--"paving" in Alison Hardie's translation. It was Hardie's word choice, "paving," that reminded me that I have also photographed sidewalks.  It started my first day in Taipei in 1989. The sidewalks were all pottery tile stamped with the manufacturer's name--I figured he must also have been a government official.  I don't have any photos from Taipei, but below are some I took in Beijing not so long ago.

The first one seems to be made from bricks similar to qing zhuan 青砖, the greyish brick you see everywhere in China.

This last one reminds me of the tactile tile strips used to make sidewalks more accessible for blind and low-vision pedestrians. However, in this case the entire two-block span was covered in this pattern.

More sidewalk designs can be seen at the blog digitallydo