Chinese Glazed Roof Tiles Advantages and Disadvantages

Chinese glazed roof tiles are one kind of representative Chinese old roof tiles. The first advantage is: they have many colors for choice, like golden yellow, green, blue, gray, red, etc. And the most common ones are golden yellow and green. In the ancient, the golden yellow color only can be used on royal buildings, like Forbidden City in Beijing. Nowadays, this color is usually used on the buildings of temples, gazebos, gardens, etc.  

The second advantage is: the surface is very smooth and bright. Especially under the sunshine, the roof of glazed roof tiles is much brighter than the others. Hence, the most temples use the golden yellow glazed roof tiles.

Chinese glazed roof tiles have one disadvantage, that is: the glaze on the surface will drop under the climate of low temperature and high humidity. If it snows a lot and the low temperature is up to 10 degree centigrade below zero, glazed roof tiles are not suitable to be used under this kind of climate. For examples, the Chinatown in Montreal, and the Forbidden City in Beijing. The roof tiles on these two buildings have the state of the glaze dropping.