A Hundred and Eight Strokes

The drum tower's position is its argument. The old tower was built in 1493, in the Hongzhi era of the Ming, by the Shandong defence vice-commissioner Liu Fu at the very centre of the old walled city of Tianjin, as a three-storeyed brick city tower with a timber superstructure. A walled town with a tower at its geometric centre is making a statement about where authority sits: not at the gate, not at the yamen, but at the point from which the four quarters are equidistant. The four gate stones of the rebuilt tower still carry the old directional names, Zhen Dong, An Xi, Ding Nan and Gong Bei, which is to say east is held, west is at peace, south is settled, north is arched to.

A large iron bell cast in the Tang and Song manner hung inside the tower and was struck 108 times each day, at dawn and at dusk. The number is not arbitrary: 108 is a figure of completeness in Chinese Buddhist reckoning, and a town that hears it twice a day is being told the day has opened and closed. The Qing poet Mei Xiaoshu hung a pillar couplet in the old tower that sets the sails of the seventy-two gu, the river settlements against the 108 strokes of the morning and evening bell, a line that makes the tower a measuring instrument for both the river's traffic and the town's time. It is the sort of object that tells you what a place counted.

The old tower was already a reconstruction when it came down. The Republican-era government rebuilt it in 1921, and it was demolished on 7 November 1952. Nearly half a century passed. Construction of the present tower began on 25 November 2000 and finished on 28 September 2001; it is 27 metres high on a footprint of 27 square metres, with a steel-concrete core beneath a brick-and-timber form, and the four white marble gate stones were inscribed with the old names by the calligrapher Hua Shikui. It is now a national 2A-rated scenic area, and the ground around it has been laid out as the Gulou commercial street, so the centre of the old town is again a centre, of a different kind.