This special issue proposes a critical lens on the immediate historicity of architectural production influenced by Chinese spatial cultures, both within and beyond China’s territorial boundaries. It invites contributions that investigate how Chinese architecture circulates, mutates, and materialises across Sinophone contexts – not merely as a stylistic export, but as an epistemic force shaped by colonial legacies, state power, and postcolonial tensions. Emphasising Sinicity as a conceptual reframing, the issue explores Chinese architectural influence as a dispersed and often contested mode of spatial knowledge – registering across Asia and beyond through diasporic practices, hybrid urbanisms, and transnational imaginaries. Seeking to transcend essentialist readings, it foregrounds architectural historicity as a site of friction between knowledge and power, historical materialism, and cultural production. In aligning with the journal’s focus, the issue repositions Chinese architecture as a mobile epistemological field, offering fresh postcolonial perspectives on its agency and transformation in Asian urban landscapes from within the global context.