Once you notice them you cannot stop counting them, and the count is genuinely informative — it is a rank displayed in plain sight on every imperial and temple roof in China.
What they are doing there#
They began as engineering. Where two roof slopes meet, the ridge tiles were pinned with iron nails, and the figures were caps that covered the nail heads and kept water out. When construction methods changed and the nails were no longer needed, the figures stayed — by then they had become a way of saying what a building was for.
The Palace Museum's own account puts it plainly: the quantity is set by the scale and standing of the building.
Reading the count#
The beasts sit in a line along the sloping ridge, led from the eaves end by a figure riding a phoenix (骑凤仙人, qífèng xiānrén), with the animals following behind him.
Then, in fixed order: dragon, phoenix, lion, celestial horse, sea horse, and beyond those a run of stranger creatures — a suanni, a fish-beast, the one-horned xiezhi that could detect a liar, a fighting bull.
- Three or five — a subsidiary hall, a gate, a side building.
- Seven or nine — a major hall. Nine was the ceiling for anything in the empire.
- Ten — the Hall of Supreme Harmony (太和殿, Tàihé Diàn), and nowhere else.
The tenth beast#
The Hall of Supreme Harmony is the throne hall of the Forbidden City and the highest-ranked building the Qing ever put up, so nine was not enough to say so. When it was rebuilt in 1695 the tile size left a gap at the end of the run, and a tenth figure was added to fill it — 行什 (hángshí), a winged creature with a monkey's face and a human body, holding a thunder implement and associated with protection from lightning.
It appears on no other roof in China. If you look at one thing on the Forbidden City's roofs, make it the far end of that line.
Where else to look#
Beijing is the obvious place, but the counting works everywhere. Temple halls, city gates, guild halls and clan ancestral halls all carry them, and a small county temple with seven beasts is telling you something about how much money and status once sat behind it.
Shanxi is the best hunting ground outside the capital, because so much early timber architecture survives there — the temples around Datong and the merchant halls of Pingyao repay a look upward.
The habit is worth building early in a trip. Roofs are the fastest way to read a Chinese building, and the beasts are the part that keeps score.
For bracket sets, roof forms and the rest of the visual grammar, see Chinese art and architecture; for the Forbidden City itself, the Beijing travel guide.