Chinese scientists have digitally reconstructed a 600-year-old Ming dynasty temple hall in Shanxi, mapping more than 4,700 individual parts into a single 3D model. That is according to a new peer-reviewed paper in Nature’s npj Heritage Science, in which a Beijing-led team introduces the first whole-building framework for ancient Chinese timber architecture.
The new standard, called the Chinese Timber Architecture Application Domain Extension (CTAADE), allows heritage halls to integrate with the same software modern cities use for 3D planning. It builds on the global CityGML 2.0 standard used by planners worldwide.
CTAADE breaks a traditional Chinese timber building into four layers — foundation, timber frame, vertical enclosure and roof — and defines 17 part types inside them, spanning columns, beams, dougong bracket sets and the mortise-and-tenon joints that make Chinese timber halls so flexible in an earthquake. Any CityGML-compatible software can now read a CTAADE-encoded hall out of the box, without a custom plug-in.
The test case was the Dabeidian, or Hall of Great Compassion, at Chongshan Temple in Taiyuan. Ming emperor Hongwu rebuilt the hall on the site of an earlier Sui-Tang temple, and in 2013, it was added to China’s National Key Cultural Heritage list.
Seven bays wide and four bays deep, the hall wears a double-eaved hipped-gable (Xieshan) roof trimmed in yellow and green glazed tiles. It inherits the Tang and Song structural logic that global heritage experts toured across Shanxi last year whilst pressing Beijing to put China’s surviving timber-frame corpus up for UNESCO World Heritage inscription.
The team started from an existing Heritage Building Information Model, or HBIM, of the Dabeidian, pulling every geometric detail out of the file before hand-mapping each part to one of the 17 CTAADE types. The result is a digital twin containing 4,704 individual parts and more than 510,000 triangular meshes, with every column, beam, dougong, ridge ornament, and roof tile now carrying its own geometric, attribute, and semantic tags.
Independent checks using four different software tools confirmed 99.2 per cent geometric validity across the 4,704 features. That falls within the tolerance set by the ISO 19107 international geometry standard.
CTAADE offers “a new paradigm for the deep integration of HBIM and GIS,” Jiadong Zhang, Miaole Hou and their seven co-authors wrote. They point to a long-running gap between the two dominant digital systems used in heritage work.
Once a hall is encoded, heritage managers can run part-level queries. They can simulate wind pressure, fire risk and solar gain against a single asset. They can also layer terrain, rivers and vegetation on top through existing CityGML modules.
The mortise-tenon joint system is already listed on UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage for its role in China’s nail-free wooden arch bridges and now sits as a standardised class inside a globally interoperable 3D mapping schema.
Shanxi Province holds the largest number of nationally protected heritage sites in China and the highest concentration of ancient wooden structures anywhere in the country. Tsinghua University’s National Heritage Centre director, Lü Zhou, has publicly called for the corpus to be inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
Pavilions, towers, pagodas, and multi-hall courtyard complexes spanning the Ming, Qing, Song, and Tang dynasties are next in line for the same digital treatment — six centuries after Ming craftsmen first raised the Dabeidian’s timbers in Taiyuan, all 4,704 of its parts now sit within a single digital twin.
- For more information: Zhang, J., Hou, M., Chen, J. et al. A CityGML ADE for modeling ancient chinese timber architecture in 3D with semantic information. npj Herit. Sci. 14, 271 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s40494-026-02535-2
