Meteorological Factors

        Every street tried all efforts to deal with the strong northeast monsoon and sand storms in winter. For example, Nine-turns Lane could avoid the suffering from winds and sand storms because of its special turns. This says that the lane had nine turns to effectively avoid the harass of northeast monsoon. They special building structure enabled residences in Nine-turns Lane to enjoy the winter sun without suffering of strong winds and sand storms.

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Characteristics of Roof Structure

       Compared with Nine-turns Land, Wufu Street (“no sky” street) developed a different way. Because the major function of the street is business. The business of the service wholesaler at that time was like our retailers now, so to take business into consideration, comfortable shops and streets should help the promotion of business. Residences of “no sky” street might have based on this consensus and made stores on both sides of the street to cooperate and built some pavilions, that is so-called “Street Pavilion”. The roofs of the pavilions were connected to each other and made “no sky”. The major structure of this kind of “Street Pavilion” was “Four-point Gold Pillars.”

         “Four-point Gold Pillar” meant to use four pillars to support the whole pavilion and covered them with a flat or slant roof. Most residences used slant roofs at that time. This kind of “no sky” didn’t block all the winds, sunshine, and rain but it offered the ventilation and skylight that the shoppers needed. To solve the problem of ventilation and skylight, there are three ways as follows:

1.The gap between the pavilion and the roof of the store

2.Set up movable or fixed skylights

3.Take advantage of the gap between high and low caused by the different times of construction

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  Control of Light

        Wu-fu street was a product of late commercial development in Lukang, and the meteorological factors is of greatest concern. In addition to preventing from rain and shine, the design of the roof also considered about the air, light and drainage works. To block out the sunshine and rain, the height of roof is about two meters for the purpose of comfortable shopping environment. As to the drainage work, all the water is collected by the pipe on the roof led to the end of the street. The light, creating by skylight or gap, makes customers to be able to shop brightly in the street.

         To drain water from the roofs in rainy days, the top of the pavilions built by the stores were two meters higher than the roofs of the stores. When it rained, the rain was gathered from the roofs of the stores beside the street and then went to the ditch by pipe. This way of carefully taking care of skylights, ventilation, and drainage rid pedestrians of their suffering of storms and effectively solve the problem of dirty water so that the “no sky” market area was neither dark nor humid at all. No wonder the famous scholar in Cing Dynasty, Hong Ci-Sheng described “no sky” in his poetry as follows :

     " Of all the houses of street, frontispiece of every house varies.

       The houses, opposite to each other, hath lighthouse for their own.

       The road, in crescent moon shape, lasted for one or two miles.

       The ground, flat as a smooth stone, hath a delight to walk on

       The clothes of customers never sweat in the summer days,

        Nor it happened in rainy days that they wet their shoes."