Editing Brick (section)

=== China ===
The earliest fired bricks appeared in Neolithic China around 4400 BC at [[Chengtoushan]], a walled settlement of the [[Daxi culture]].<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=n00CnC84MIcC|title=Water Civilization: From Yangtze to Khmer Civilizations|author=Yoshinori Yasuda|pages=30–31|publisher=Springer Science & Business Media|year=2012|isbn=9784431541103}}</ref> These bricks were made of red clay, fired on all sides to above 600&nbsp;°C, and used as flooring for houses. By the [[Qujialing culture|Qujialing period]] (3300 BC), fired bricks were being used to pave roads and as building foundations at Chengtoushan.<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=n00CnC84MIcC|title=Water Civilization: From Yangtze to Khmer Civilizations|author=Yoshinori Yasuda|pages=33–35|publisher=Springer Science & Business Media|year=2012|isbn=9784431541103}}</ref>

According to Lukas Nickel, the use of ceramic pieces for protecting and decorating floors and walls dates back at various cultural sites to 3000-2000 BC and perhaps even before, but these elements should be rather qualified as [[tile]]s. For the longest time builders relied on wood, mud and rammed earth, while fired brick and mudbrick played no structural role in architecture. Proper brick construction, for erecting walls and [[vault (architecture)|vaults]], finally emerges in the third century BC, when baked bricks of regular shape began to be employed for vaulting underground tombs. Hollow brick tomb chambers rose in popularity as builders were forced to adapt due to a lack of readily available wood or stone.<ref name=":2">Lukas Nickel: Bricks in Ancient China and the Question of Early Cross-Asian Interaction, ''Arts Asiatiques'', Vol. 70 (2015), pp. 49-62 (50f.)</ref> The oldest extant brick building above ground is possibly [[Songyue Pagoda]], dated to 523 AD.

By the end of the third century BC in China, both hollow and small bricks were available for use in building walls and ceilings. Fired bricks were first mass-produced during the construction of the tomb of China's first Emperor, [[Qin Shi Huang]]di. The floors of the three pits of the [[Terracotta Army]] were paved with an estimated 230,000 bricks, with the majority measuring 28x14x7 cm, following a 4:2:1 ratio. The use of fired bricks in Chinese city walls first appeared in the [[Han dynasty|Eastern Han dynasty]] (25 AD-220 AD).<ref>{{cite journal | pmc=6430406 | year=2019 | last1=Xue | first1=Q. | last2=Jin | first2=X. | last3=Cheng | first3=Y. | last4=Yang | first4=X. | last5=Jia | first5=X. | last6=Zhou | first6=Y. | title=The historical process of the masonry city walls construction in China during 1st to 17th centuries AD | journal=PLOS ONE | volume=14 | issue=3 | pages=e0214119 | doi=10.1371/journal.pone.0214119 | pmid=30901369 | bibcode=2019PLoSO..1414119X | doi-access=free }}</ref> Up until the Middle Ages, buildings in Central Asia were typically built with unbaked bricks. It was only starting in the ninth century CE when buildings were entirely constructed using fired bricks.<ref name=":2" />

The carpenter's manual ''[[Yingzao Fashi]]'', published in 1103 at the time of the [[Song dynasty]] described the brick making process and [[Ceramic glaze|glazing]] techniques then in use. Using the 17th-century encyclopaedic text ''[[Song Yingxing|Tiangong Kaiwu]]'', historian [[Timothy Brook (historian)|Timothy Brook]] outlined the brick production process of [[Ming dynasty]] China: {{blockquote|...the kilnmaster had to make sure that the temperature inside the kiln stayed at a level that caused the clay to shimmer with the colour of molten gold or silver. He also had to know when to quench the kiln with water so as to produce the surface glaze. To anonymous labourers fell the less skilled stages of brick production: mixing clay and water, driving oxen over the mixture to trample it into a thick paste, scooping the paste into standardised wooden frames (to produce a brick roughly 42&nbsp;cm long, 20&nbsp;cm wide, and 10&nbsp;cm thick), smoothing the surfaces with a wire-strung bow, removing them from the frames, printing the fronts and backs with stamps that indicated where the bricks came from and who made them, loading the kilns with fuel (likelier wood than coal), stacking the bricks in the kiln, removing them to cool while the kilns were still hot, and bundling them into pallets for transportation. It was hot, filthy work.}}