Kang (heated platform)

Common card · No. 227882

The kang (Chinese: 炕; pinyin: kàng; Manchu: ᠨᠠᡥᠠᠨ nahan, Kazakh: кән) is a traditional heated platform, 2 metres or more long, used for general living, working, entertaining and sleeping in the northern part of China, where the winter climate is cold. It is made of bricks or other forms of fired clay and more recently of concrete in some locations. The word kang means "to dry". Its interior cavity, leading to an often-convoluted flue system, channels the hot exhaust from a firewood/coal fireplace, usually the cooking fire from an adjacent room that serves as a kitchen, sometimes from a stove set below floor level. This allows a longer contact time between the exhaust (which still contains much heat from the combustion source) and (indirectly) the inside of the room, hence more heat transfer/recycling back into the room, effectively making it a ducted heating system similar to the Roman hypocaust. A separate stove may be used to control the amount of smoke circulating through the kang, maintaining...

Read on Wikipedia · Image H.E.M. James or one of his travel companions/contacts (possibly Rev. John Ross of Mukden; see p. xi), Public domain