Anyone who entered the Chinese architecture field in North America or Europe in the last century has known the name Ernst Boerschmann. Few, however, have read more than one of his books; and there are more than ten, some of them multi-volume. In part this is because he wrote almost exclusively in German; but it is also because Boershmann's writings had such limited circulation. Edouard Kögel's book does much to right this situation.

This 592-page, beautifully produced book tells the story of Ernst Boerschmann - military official, architect, citizen of Germany, and a man as passionate about Chinese architecture as about any other aspect of life. It also tells the story of his struggle to see, measure, and draw Chinese architecture, and then to publish his results during the challenging first three decades of the twentieth century. The 575 illustrations are primarily Boerschmann's photographs and drawings, supplemented in a few places by the author's.

Ernst Boerschmann was born in East Prussia in 1873, the youngest of three children. Walking by a chinoiserie building on his way to school in Memel everyday may have been the inspiration for his career. Upon graduating from the local Gymnasium, Boerschmann became an architecture student in Berlin. Five years later he entered the military where he continued his study of architecture. In 1902 he was assigned to a post in China where he designed for the army and occasionally structures such as a hospital. Boerschmann already aspired to study Chinese architecture but had little opportunity. The only site he had a chance to really study and draw was Biyunsi, Azure Clouds Monastery, in the western hills of Beijing. Upon returning to Germany, Boerschmann wrote a memorandum whose purpose was to bring attention to the importance of Chinese architecture to Europe. The documents convinced others in the German government to more strongly support a German presence in China. Before his return to China in 1906 as a member of the German Legation in Beijing, he also published his first major work on Chinese architecture, on Biyunsi. Boerschmann also by this time was being drawn more spiritually to China.

Between 1906 and 1909, Ernst Boerschmann studied and drew every building he could. He began in Beijing and then extended his study to the Beijing sphere, complexes such as the Eastern Qing tombs in Zunhua and the Manchu summer resort in Chengde that included remains of a palace, eleven monasteries, and gardens. In Beijing, he studied the pagoda of Tianning Monastery, the archway at Cloud Terrace Pass (Juyongguan), architecture of Beijing's Western Hills, and the Western Qing tombs south of the capital. He then ventured west to Mount Wutai in Shanxi province. A carefully planned and recorded journey such as this raises awareness of the many monuments those studying China in the first half of the twentieth century were aware of and equally emphasizes those that were not known, not just to Boerschmann but to China's first generation of architects such as Liang Sicheng (1901-1971) who travelled the same routes in the 1930s. Both Boerschmann and Liang missed the Liao pagoda in Lingqiu and Boerschmann missed both Tang buildings on Mount Wutai, one of them, at the Foguang Monastery, to be noted by a Japanese expedition in the 1920s and carefully studied and published by Liang and his research group in the 1930s. Boerschmann then journeyed to Kaifeng in Henan where he studied all the major pagodas and Kaifeng's main mosque, but not the synagogue that would be documented by William Charles White whose twenty-five-year service as Bishop of Henan would begin in 1909. From Henan, Boerschmann travelled east to Shandong where he documented the architecture of Mount Tai and the many Confucian complexes of Qufu, of which the most important Confucius Temple is just one. Boerschmann spent the winter of 1907–08 in the warmer south, beginning in Shanghai and going to Hangzhou. Boerschmann also documented Suzhou and its seven pagodas during this period.

The trip from Hangzhou by way of Ningbo led to Mount Putuo, the unique sacred Buddhist peak that is an island. It became the subject of Boerschmann's first monograph. Spring brought him to China's most important province for old architecture, Shanxi, where he stayed approximately two months. He spent several weeks in Taiyuan where he studied the Yongle Buddhist monastery and Buddhist caves at Tianlongshan, and then headed south along the Fen River via the temple dedicated to Emperor Yao to Yuncheng, the major city at the southern end of the province and location of China's major temple to the war god Guandi. Boerschmann then continued westward to Xi'an by way of Mount Hua. In Xi'an, he drew and photographed the major monuments still among China's best known, as well as an orphanage and probably some of the earliest pictures of the bath house of the infamous concubine Yang Guifei. He continued to two of Shaanxi's less-known counties, Fengxian and Mianxian, then went southwest to Sichuan where he studied the monuments of the major city Chengdu and the sacred peak Emeishan, and then headed to Leshan whose monumental Buddha he mentions but did not photograph. Boerschmann stayed in Sichuan until November, then went to Hunan's sacred peak Mount Heng. As the year turned to 1909, he made a brief stop in Guilin and then returned to this southern part of China, travelling southward through Guangxi and then Guangdong. Boerschmann ended this extraordinary journey by the beginning of March of 1909, returned to Hangzhou, and then left Beijing for Berlin by train on July 19.

More than halfway through the book, the reader has seen stunning photographs and superior architectural drawings of China's major religious monuments, including those on the sacred mountains. Anyone who has known this material for decades or someone seeing it for the first time cannot but be aware of its importance. Why then has it remained remote even in the lightly trafficked field of Chinese architectural scholarship. Most of the rest of the book, more than 200 pages, explains why.

Boerschmann spent most of the next twenty-two years, from 1909–1931, trying to publish the research from his years in China. It was an extraordinary record: 2,500 pages of sketches and notes, 1,000 more pages in diary format, and 8,000 photographs, 1,000 of them in the form of glass plates. He was aware from the beginning, the close of the first decade of the twentieth century, that the combined efforts of Japanese archaeologists and explorers might have yielded such an archive, but not one of them had seen as much as he, nor possessed Boerschmann's skill to draw his findings. But they had what Boerschmann did not: recognition of the importance of their research for their home country and government support.

Boerschmann had been applying for funding and writing reports for the Foreign Office, Ministry of Water, and Ministry of Education since the beginning of the century. He usually received something, if not the full amount he requested or needed. What he published and when was more dependent on funding than any other factor. This personal side of Boerschmann's struggle to make China's architecture known in Germany and beyond is a fascinating aspect of the book, one with which scholars today will empathize. For example, in 1911 he requested funding from the Imperial Office of the Interior for a six-volume work. The drawings were nearly finished and the first volume, on Mount Putuo, the study mentioned above and one that did reach completion, also was ready. The request, however, was for a leave from his government duties to do research, and this kind of request was complicated. There was discussion in Boerschmann's proposal of an exhibition that included models of Chinese buildings. In the end, seventeen drawings presented to the Foreign Office became part of an exhibition about China that also included material on hygiene, medicine, and public transportation. The volume on Mount Putuo was published in 1911.Footnote ¹ The book had limited circulation, even in Europe. This may be due to its lavish design with a wood-block print of the bodhisattva Guanyin on the cover page. The book also did not fare as well as Boerschmann hoped with reviews. Scholars of Chinese art and philosophy, notably William Cohn, Alfred Forke, and Berthold Laufer, questioned Boershmann's understanding of broad issues of Chinese philosophy.

There followed in 1912 an exhibition of 400 of Boerschmann's photographs and drawings at the Royal Museum of Decorative Arts in Berlin. Yet in September of 1913 Boerschmann's budget for funding was denied by the Imperial Treasury Office. Later Boerschmann's leave for research was extended by that office to March of 1915. The second volume of six, on memorial temples, that included a focus on the temple to Confucius in Qufu and temple to the war god Guandi in Yuncheng, was published in 1914. Already in August of 1913 the Foreign Office had questioned the dilatory pace of publication. By the end of 1914, Boershmann, then forty-one years old, was called into the reserves, as World War I had begun.

After the War, there was a burst of publications about Asia. The discussion here is an example of the way Kögel deftly weaves the history of the profession into his subject. Bernd Melchers produced a book focused on Lingyan Monastery that included discussion of twelve monasteries in and outside Beijing. Boershmann's review criticised Melchers’ approach as too art historical, and took issue with certain facts about which Melchers turned out to be accurate. This was not the first nor would it be the last time Boerschmann took issue with scholars who were not architects who wrote architectural history.

Boerschmann worked as an architect for the Ministry of War after the war, and then the Ministry of Finance. In 1921 he began applying for funding to continue research full time and return to China. He also had been informed by the Museum of Ethnology that it could no longer store his materials. Boerschmann managed to get two more years of support. Between 1923 and 1926, his most popular book, China: Landschaft und Baukunst was published in many languages with variant titles; and has subsequently often been published, as well. The best-known English version is Picturesque China. Riding this success, Boerschmann's two-volume Chinesische Architektur was published in 1925. It and the one of two intended volumes on pagodas, published in 1931 were the two books known to this author before the current increased interest in Boerschmann represented by this book.Footnote ² Between then, in 1927, Boerschmann published a book on the use of ceramics in Chinese architecture, a subject to which a European scholar finally returned in 2015.Footnote ³

Kögel's conclusion, about fifty pages, raises questions that probably will have become apparent to the reader. He understands that Boerschmann “was not a man of theories or a historian in the classical sense, but a sensitive observer. . .” (p. 505). Boerschmann was not the first foreigner, not even the first German, to engage in research on Chinese architecture, but he was the first to engage at this level, without even a close second in Europe for decades. However, Boerschmann was a bureaucrat, a government official whose day job for much of his career was design that had little to do with China. He was less educated in Sinology, especially the Classical language or history and philosophy, and yet he took liberties in his writing to interpret Chinese religion; Kögel uses the word holistic to describe the goal of Boerschmann's approach. To his regret, Boerschmann did not have colleagues in China.

Given the pace of new finds in China, one must scrutinise a decision to publish an expansive study based on research that took place in the first decade of the twentieth century. The value of this book is not due to the fact that Chinese architecture remains an understudied subject. It is, rather, because the turmoil in China of every decade from the 1930s through the 1970s gave way to widespread destruction and rebuilding anew of so much of China's early architecture. Boerschmann's drawings are often the unique record of a monument or complex. In any case, they must be studied alongside existing buildings. If Boerschmann made mistakes in the narrative, future study of Chinese architecture will discover them, for now that Boerschmann's work is known, future research can no longer ignore it.