Academy, private school, Confucius Institute: analyzing heritage art of educational architectural paintings via event coding

Abstract The tomb ritual system serves as a vital mechanism for sustaining clan ethics within China’s patriarchal society and constitutes an institutional foundation for ancestral worship culture. As a paradigmatic ritual system, it reinforces familial identity, intergenerational continuity, and spatial order through periodic ancestral ceremonies. Its architectural expressions reflect a triadic function encompassing ritual regulation, symbolic schema, and spiritual representation. While existing scholarship has examined the influence of ancestral culture on the formation of educational architectural traditions, limited attention has been paid to the mural arts of Chinese traditional educational buildings. Drawing on relational hermeneutic theory, this study first employs event coding to construct models of the development trajectory and influencing layers of academy culture. It then adopts an iconographic method to comparatively analyze 22 architectural wall paintings from Guangdong and 12 from Shaanxi, exploring the kinship between architecture and ritual art along two dimensions: pro-educational nature and pro-spirituality.