The Tower over Daixian Old Town

The tower stands where the main streets of Dai County's old town cross, at Shangguan, the seat of the county in Xinzhou. A first tower was raised in 1374, the seventh year of Hongwu, by the Ming commander Lu Heng, Marquis of Ji'an, and named Jingbian Tower; that building was about ten metres high. In 1471 fire destroyed it. Liu Chong and Cai Lin rebuilt it on a raised base and finished the work in 1476, when it took the name it still carries, Bianjing. The present tower is forty metres tall, of brick and timber, and is described as the largest surviving wooden drum tower in China. Its brick base rises thirteen metres, measures 43.3 metres east to west and 33.3 metres north to south, and is pierced by a stone arch nine metres high.

A drum tower was an instrument of time and of alarm, and this one was built for observation and for signalling with drums. It stood at the highest point of the walled town, from which the watch could look north towards Yanmen and south over the Hutuo river, and that position made it more than a clock: it served as the command centre of the defence system of the three passes. The claim is written on the building. On the north face hangs a great placard reading Awe-Inspiring over the Three Passes, set there in 1733, the eleventh year of Yongzheng, by the prefectural magistrate Yang Hongzhi; the three are Yanmen, Ningwu and Pianguan. Two more placards hang on the building, one reading First Tower of Yanmen and the other claiming that the drum is heard in every direction.

From the upper gallery the old geography is still readable: the walled town below, the Hutuo somewhere to the south, and the mountains towards Yanmen in the north. The tower also holds a local museum, and among its exhibits is a stone lantern 1.9 metres high, carved around 720 in the shape of Mount Wutai, the Buddhist mountain east of here, a small object that maps a whole pilgrimage landscape onto a single stone. The building entered the fifth batch of national key cultural relics on 25 June 2001, as number 5-235. Dai County keeps two of them within a short drive: this tower in the town and the pass in the mountains to the north.