A major concern of this dissertation is the practical, spiritual, and aesthetic reasons behind the fervor of miniature-making: what qualities made these small objects particularly appealing to people? My study reveals that religion, especially Mahayana Buddhism, played a central role in the proliferation of Chinese miniatures. I argue that the Buddhist worldview of the universe being a recursive, self-multiplying system of "worlds-within-worlds, " a concept that resonates with William Blake's poetic imagination of "a world in a grain of sand, " has been translated into distinctive motifs of art by means of miniaturization. The decrease in size allowed a much detailed display within a limited space; it signaled the uncanny, the illusory, and the sublime, which helped to convey abstract Buddhist tenets and assist one's visualization of a transcendental realm beyond the everyday experience. Since visualization was a key step of reaching Buddhahood, miniatures assumed liturgical as well as soteriological functions. For both elites and commoners, they became all-important symbols of spiritual power and "expedient means" of obtaining enlightenment and salvation.

Another important question is: what historical and social factors stimulated the flourishing of miniature architecture? I propose that on the one hand, it was due to the high standardization of Chinese architecture in the eleventh century. This standardization greatly facilitated miniature-making, because carpenters only had to reduce the size of the standard timber material while the same set of rules and formulas for large buildings would still apply. On the other hand, since miniatures were never the main targets of sumptuary laws, they granted carpenters much freedom to execute their ideas and showcase their skills. With the installation of increasingly stricter statutes on building activities, it was often safer and more economic to invest in miniatures than in large structures to achieve similar levels of impressiveness and feelings of importance. The trend of miniaturization was also observed in painting, sculpture, masonry, ceramics, and cabinetry; it became a hallmark of the material culture of twelfth-century China and endured well into later centuries.

The dissertation engages with earlier works on miniatures by scholars such as Rolf Stein and Susan Stewart, whose expositions of the associations between miniatures and mythology, Daoist aesthetics and aspirations, literary imagination, childhood, fairy tales, desire, nostalgia, interiority, and time shed much light on how miniatures can be interpreted from cultural and psychoanalytic perspectives. Some of their observations and conclusions are reexamined in my dissertation in light of new materials and new contexts. Meanwhile, the way I study my subject has been influenced by modern critical theories, especially deconstruction and phenomenology: I argue that from the designer's perspective, to miniaturize was to deconstruct, whereby the correlation between form and function, between sign and signified was destabilized. From the beholder's perspective, a miniature was intrinsically oneiric, theatrical, and evocative, engendering a series of Bachelardian reveries. From an epistemological perspective, a miniature can be viewed as a simulacrum no less "real" than a large building, but both were materialized mental images serving as our instruments of approaching the world and the self.

The types of primary sources investigated in this dissertation cover a large span of historical periods. They not only include architectural remains, paintings, prints, reliefs, ceramics, bronzes, and pieces of furniture from prehistoric to late imperial China, but also encompass various texts--architectural treatises, religious scriptures, official and local histories, philosophical essays, myths, poems, fictions, miscellanea, and encyclopedias. To process such a large body of materials, I have started developing an online database, Project CloudCastle: Chinese Architecture Database, which outgrows the scope of this dissertation and aims to function as an open-access reference and research guide for Chinese architecture. It offers information on historic buildings, sites, and terminology, and features interactive photogrammetric and Rhino 3D models to enable a heightened awareness of, and a "tangible" way of critiquing, the spatial and dimensional attributes of the objects. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).