From Typology to Conservation: Landscape-Gene Zoning of Endangered Vernacular Dwellings in China’s West Liaoning Corridor

The West Liaoning Corridor in China links Northeast and North China and has long brought Han, Manchu, Mongol, and Korean communities into contact. Its Tun-ding dwellings remain insufficiently defined as a corridor-scale heritage family and are increasingly threatened by rural depopulation, reinforced-concrete rebuilding, and the decline of craft knowledge. Focusing on endangered vernacular dwellings in the corridor, this study develops a landscape-gene zoning framework that moves from typological classification to spatial conservation zoning, clarifies typological characteristics and internal variation, and provides an empirical basis for differentiated heritage conservation in a multi-ethnic corridor. The sample comprises 30 nationally listed traditional villages and 15,929 buildings, but because the twelve coded attributes are constant within each village, the analysis is conducted at the village-profile level rather than at the building level. A hierarchical landscape-gene coding system was constructed with 7 objective layers and 18 criterion layers. Administrative and ethnic attributes were separated from architectural features, and 10 architectural criteria were matched against four external reference prototypes—P1 North Chinese courtyard, P2 Mongolian ger, P3 Korean regional dwelling, and P4 Manchu pocket house—using categorical and Jaccard matching to produce a four-score village profile. Ward-linkage hierarchical clustering then yielded five Typological Classes. In a separate interpretative step, these classes were translated into five Conservation Zones by considering river-basin context and material vulnerability. Han- and Manchu-related architectural genes were the most prominent in the coded attributes; Mongol-related features were retained mainly in local terminology and roof silhouette, whereas no Korean dwelling feature was detected. The study establishes a reproducible workflow from statistical typology to spatial zoning and identifies the Tun-ding dwelling as a continuous architectural lineage rather than a single isolated type. The Conservation Zones are, therefore, reported as indicative planning groupings grounded in typological evidence and river-basin logic. Morphological resemblance alone does not establish historical transmission or cultural causation, and the final zoning boundaries require future building-by-building field verification.