Feiyun Tower: A Timber Structure in Wanrong

Feiyun Tower is not a free-standing monument; it stands inside a temple, just within the gate of the Eastern Peak Temple in the middle of Wanrong county town, at 8 West Street in Xiedian town. The temple is the older institution. It was founded before the Zhenguan era of the Tang, rebuilt between 1291 and 1297, the twenty-eighth year of the Zhiyuan era to the first year of the Dade era, and repaired repeatedly under the Ming and Qing. In 1988 it was listed in the third batch of national key cultural relics protection units. The tower within it is said to have been first built in the early Tang, but the body standing today follows a rebuilding of 1746.

The tower is square in plan, five bays wide and five bays deep, and 23.19 metres tall. It reads as three storeys with four rings of eaves, and the top is closed with a cross-hip roof; inside, those three visible storeys prove to be five levels. The number that matters most is 345: that is how many bracket sets are packed under the eaves, set close together and varied in form. Four columns stand at the centre of the building, 0.7 metres across and 15.45 metres high, running from the base through all three storeys. The structure is timber, cut and fitted rather than massed, and that is what the eye follows upward.

The name is a description of the eaves. Three hundred and forty-five bracket sets, crowded together and cut in different combinations, read from below as a band of cloud moving around the building: feiyun, flying cloud. The effect is deliberate. The brackets are structural, but they are also rhythmic, and the upper storeys seem to be carried on them rather than on walls. Chinese accounts of the building call it the first timber tower of China and treat it as the extreme case of the traditional timber pavilion. That is a large claim for a building 23 metres high, and it rests on the density of the woodwork rather than on size.