We may receive a commission when you use our affiliate links. However, this does not impact our recommendations.
As a child, I disliked assembling puzzles. What’s the fun in piecing together hundreds of pieces of cardboard into a flat image of a happy whale family?
But Lincoln Logs, on the other hand, had my full attention. Yes, I know I was not a consistent child.
This week I drove to the Headley-Whitney Museum in Lexington, Ky., to watch a team of eight men disassemble an 800-piece puzzle made of red sandalwood in the shape of the Ten Thousand Springs Pavilion. The original pavilion, known as Wan Chun Ting, sits on a man-made hill in the Forbidden City (check out the awesome photos here). The pavilion was built about 1420 (rebuilt in 1533) and offers beautiful views of the Forbidden City.
This sandalwood replica was built about 10 years ago and was donated to the Smithsonian by the China Red Sandalwood Museum in Beijing, according to Don Williams of the Smithsonian, who leads a team of volunteers that move the 1:5 replica to museums around the country.
This week, the team of volunteers had to take apart the pavilion, pack each part into specially designed crates and prepare them for their journey to the International Museum of Art & Science in McAllen, Texas, where it will be installed there the last week of January and will tentatively be on exhibit for six months.
From a woodworker’s perspective, the pavilion is a fantastic study in carving and joinery (not to mention form). The entire replica pavilion is assembled without nails. Lincoln Logs? Ha. Wait until you see Ming Logs. As the volunteers removed the carvings and the roof structure, I got to examine the support structure below, which was a maze of interlocking bridle joints. Many of these bridle joints have circular shoulders so they could mate with round columns.
And they all had to fit together loosely enough to go together with hand pressure, yet tighten up enough that the entire structure was as rigid as a real house when complete (and weighing one ton).
The detail – inside and out – was astounding. The doors to the pavilion were built using through-mortise-and-tenon joints. And the pierced latticework was all carved from solid panels of sandalwood. And the raised panels (shown in the video) were also carved from solid.
If you have an opportunity to see this pavilion in Texas, don’t miss it.
— Christopher Schwarz
