The glazed tile, as a high-grade building material in old China, was used exclusively on palace buildings of the imperial house of the big mansions of nobles and high officials.

The glaze was normally in one of four colours: yellow, green, blue and black. Tiles coated with it not only add splendour to the buildings but, in old times, carried a political significance.

Yellow tiles were reserved for use on the roofs of imperial palaces, mausoleums, imperial gardens and temples. This, it is said, was because yellow is the colour of the Yellow River, once believed to be the cradle of the Chinese civilization. Yellow, therefore, was taken as the cardinal colour of the core and became the imperial colour to be used exclusively by the rulers.

It can be seen that the colours of the roof tiles indicated the positions of the people who lived in the house. Even in the same part, as for instance the Summer Palace of Beijing, differently coloured tiles were used for different houses. The groups of halls and pavilions used by the monarch and his family, visitors will notice, have yellow roofs whereas the quarters for the court officials have green roofs. As for other structures erected for landscaping or for the accommodation of people without a senior rank, they have as a rule black tiles.

Tiles of yellow glaze, however, also cover certain halls which were not built for the imperial family, as for instance temples dedicated to Confucius and Guan Yu (A famous general of the Three Kingdoms Period), worshipped for his bravery and loyalty, but this was because they were canonized by emperors of later dynasties as their equals and given posthumous titles as such.