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The ''kang'' (; Manchu: ''nahan'') is a traditional long (2 metres or more) platform for general living, working, entertaining and sleeping, made of bricks or other forms of fired clay and more recently of concrete in some locations. Its interior cavity, leading to a flue, channels the exhaust from a wood or coal cooking fire, usually the fire would be fed from an adjacent room which serves as a kitchen, sometimes from a stove set below floor level. A separate stove may be used for controlling the amount of smoke circulating through the kang, maintaining comfort in warmer weather. Typically, a ''kang'' occupies one-third to one half the area the room, and is used for sleeping at night and for other activities during the day. A kang which covers the entire floor is called a dikang ().〔 Like the European ceramic stove, a massive block of masonry is used to retain heat. While it might take several hours of heating to reach the desired surface temperature, a properly designed bed raised to sufficient temperature should remain warm throughout the night without the need to maintain a fire. ==History== The ''kang'' is said to be derived from the concept of a heated bed floor called a ''huoqiang'' found in China in the Neolithic period, according to analysis of archeological excavations of building remains in Banpo Xi'an. However, archeological sites in Shenyang, Liaoning, show humans using the heated bed floor as early as 7,200 years ago.〔http://www.healthyheating.com/History_of_Radiant_Heating_and_Cooling/History_of_Radiant_Heating_and_Cooling_Part_1.pdf〕 The bed at this excavation is made of 10 cm pounded clay on the floor. The bed was heated by ''zhidi'' which is simply the process of placing an open fire on the bed floor and clearing the ashes before sleeping. It is mentioned by Tang poet Meng Jiao in his poem titled ''Handi Baixing Yin''. 'No fuel to heat the floor to sleep, standing and crying with cold at midnight instead'. In the excavated example the repeated burning is believed to have turned the bed surface hard and moisture resistant. The first known type of heated platform appeared in modern-day Northeast of China and used a single flue systems found in the hypocaust of Ancient Rome and the ''ondol'' of Korean origin.〔 An example of this type of heated platform was unearthed in 1st-century building remains in the Heilongjiang Province. Its single flue is 'L' shaped, built from adobe and cobblestones and covered with stone slabs. Heated walls with a double flue system was found in a 4th-century ancient palace building in the Jilin Province. It has an 'L' shaped adobe bench with a double flue system. It is structurally more complex than a single flue system and has functionality similar to a ''kang''. The word ''kang'' means "to dry", first documented in the Chinese dictionary in AD121. The earliest ''kang'' remains have been discovered at Ninghai, Heilongjiang Province, in the Longquanfu Palace (699-926) of Balhae origin. The ''kang'' may have evolved to its bed design from earlier developments due to ongoing cultural changes during the Southern and Northern Dynasties, as high furniture and chairs came to be prevalent, over the earlier style of floor-sitting and low-lying furniture in Chinese culture.〔 Literary evidence from the Shui Jing Zhu also gives evidence of heated floors by the Northern Wei Dynasty, though it was not explicitly named a dikang:〔 Outside China, the concept of a "masonry heater", a large stove made of brick or other masonry keeping a house warm for a long time, has been used in various forms throughout northern and eastern Europe. In particular, Russians have traditionally used a similar sort of stove/bed, known as the Russian oven ((ロシア語:Русская печь)); it is unknown whether this was introduced from the East during the period of the "Tatar yoke". 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Kang bed-stove」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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