Rebuilt/restored🛕 Temple & religious buildingMiddle Ages & early modern
Porcelain Tower of Nanjing
Travel accounts made the pagoda an influential image of Chinese architecture in Europe. The modern reconstruction shows how a lost monument can acquire new meaning without the return of its historic fabric.
Photo: Chainwit. · CC BY 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Facts
- Place
- Nanjing, China
- Civilisation / patron
- Ming dynasty
- Built
- 1412 – 1431
- Destroyed
- 1856 · Destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion.
- Status
- Rebuilt/restored
- Height
- 79 m
- Seven Wonders of the Middle Ages
History
The Porcelain Tower was a 79-metre Buddhist pagoda beside the Grand Bao’en Temple, built on the orders of the Ming court. Glazed bricks and tiles gave its nine storeys the bright, lustrous appearance described in detail by foreign travellers. The original tower was destroyed in 1856 during the Taiping Rebellion. In 2015 a modern interpretive reconstruction of glass and steel opened beside the preserved archaeological remains; it is not a full reconstruction of the original.
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