The interior ceiling of ancient Chinese architecture is raised upwards like a well, and the four walls are decorated with patterns, which are used in the most important parts such as the throne in the palace temple and above the Buddha altar. It is a small wooden work in the Song "Construction of the French Style"; it is a wooden work in the Qing "Inner Courtyard Engineering Practice".
Moi originated from the ventilation and light opening on the top of the ancient cave dwelling, "Middle Slip". The Xijing Fu notes that "The algae well is in the middle of the building, the wood is like a well, and the painting is based on the algae text", which is named after it. There are two square wells misplaced "Dousi" algae wells in the Yinan Han Tomb, and there are "bucket-shaped algae wells" in the Han Dynasty Cliff Tomb in Leshan, Sichuan. The Song "Construction of the French Style" called the three-layer superimposed "DouBazao Well" composed of square wells, octagonal wells and douba (eight corner beams composed of eight pyramids), and only the octagonal wells and douba were called "small bucket eight algae wells". The earliest surviving wooden algae well is on the upper floor of the Guanyin Pavilion of Dule Temple in Jixian County, built in 984, erasing the four corners of the square well and adding bucket eight to the top. In Song and Liao architecture, the algae wells were decorated with various lattices or strips on the triangular surface between the octagonal beams.
After the Song Dynasty, algae wells gradually became more delicate. The main hall of the Jodoji Temple in Kindaiying County has a two-story octagonal well above the square well, and the top eight parts of the bucket are covered with 24 bucket beams (see picture). In the Ming Dynasty architecture, the octagonal well and the douba were combined into one, and the douba did not show the corner beams, and the eight-sided back plate was decorated with buckets or carved cloud dragon flower ornaments. The Qing Dynasty Algae Well of the Taihe Hall of the Forbidden City in Beijing is a round well on the octagonal well, in which is a carved dragon with a hanging head, called the Dragon Well, which is the most luxurious algae well in the Qing Dynasty architecture. Some folk buildings, moi wells, starting from the octagonal wells, pick out the slopes in turn, spiral-shaped, shrink layer by layer, clustered at the top, and very decorative. In the pavilions of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, in conjunction with Xuan, there are often corner beams and curved rafters to form a roof similar to the algae well, and the dark maroon simple beams and rafters, with polished looking bricks or white paint, look very elegant.
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