A building with a wooden frame and ceramic tile roof has defined entry into the Chinese sphere for millennia. When a foreign import such as the Buddhist stupa entered China, it was quickly transformed into a four-sided structure with real or facsimile wooden components and actual or imitation ceramic roof eaves. In China today, a building made of reinforced concrete may be capped by a ceramic tile roof.

If ever there was a challenge to the Chinese building system, it should have occurred during the period of Mongolian rule. A premise of Chinese history is that the Yuan Dynasty is almost the singular time when a civilisation otherwise nearly impenetrable by foreign influences changed due to forces from the outside. Already in the 1250s, a captive from Belgrade named Guillaume Boucher designed a fountain for the flow of airagh in Möngke Khan's hall of audience at the first Mongol capital at Khara Khorum. Still, during Khubilai's reign (r. 1260–94), the halls of the palace city at Daidu were supported by the ubiquitous Chinese timber frame and most of them had ceramic tile roofs, and the Temple to the Northern Peak was built in 1270 according to the highest Chinese building standards in Quyang, Hebei province. Yet just a year later, Khubilai's advisor, a Nepali named Anige (1245–1306), supervised the construction of a White Pagoda in Lamaist style that soared more than 50 meters in Daidu. The brick observation tower, also begun during Khubilai's reign, in Haocheng, Dengfeng county, Henan, in the shadow of the Buddhist central peak, Songshan, has been considered an example of the infiltration of a non-Chinese architectural presence in China during the Yuan Dynasty, as well. Here we investigate the extent to which it involved non-Chinese influence on Chinese architecture.

Much is known about the Yuan observatory. Begun in 1279, its main building, known as Guanxingtai (elevated structure for observing the stars), rises 17 meters in the precinct of about 123 by 92 meters (Fig. 5.1).