Kang bed-stove

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The kang (Chinese: 炕; pinyin: kàng) is a long (2 meters or more) sleeping platform made of bricks or other forms of fired clay. Its interior cavity, leading to a flue, channels the exhaust from a wood or coal stove. Whenever it became too cold in the unheated Chinese building that housed such a sleeping platform, the heat of the cooking fire could be used for maintaining comfort.

Like its relative, the European ceramic stove, the heat-retaining capacity of such a massive block of masonry is tremendous. So while it might take several daytime hours of heating to reach its desired surface temperature, the bed would remain warm all through the night even though nobody arose to feed the fire.

Traditional Chinese Dwellings (Zhongguo chuantong minju) (a bilingual text) has a few line drawings of kangs. It says that the kang

is used to cook meals and heat the room, making full use of the heat-retaining capacity of the loess [soil used to make adobe]. The kang uses radiant heat the amount of which should be two degrees higher than that of the ambient air and should come from most surfaces of the room.

In this picture of a room in a Chinese inn, reproduced from Wandering in Northern China, by Harry A. Franck (Copyright 1923 by the Century Company of New York and London), one can see a man who may be the author sitting at a short-legged table that has been placed on the kang. Behind the kang is a fine window that lets much light into the room. The window appears to be closed by a paper-covered lattice, not a pane of glass.

The kang was also an important feature of traditional dwellings in the often frigid northeastern region of Manchuria, where it was known as nahan in the native language of the local Manchus.