The Stork Tower at Yongji, and the Tower in the Poem

The tower takes its name from birds. Storks used to rest on it, and the Chinese name is written either way, Guanque or Guanjue. It stands at Puzhou town in Yongji, on the Yellow River by the old Pujin ferry, and it is counted with the Yellow Crane Tower, Yueyang Tower and the Pavilion of Prince Teng among the four great towers of China, the only one of the four on the northern bank. The first tower was raised in the Northern Zhou by Yuwen Hu, the powerful minister who lived from 513 to 572, as a military watchtower against the Northern Qi. It stood through the Tang and Song, about seven hundred years, and it was Wang Zhihuan's poem, On the Stork Tower, that made it famous.

What stands there now was built quickly by the standards of the old one. Work began on 31 December 1997 and the tower opened on 26 September 2002, about three kilometres from the old city of Puzhou. It is 73.9 metres high, roughly a building of more than twenty storeys, with three storeys and four eaves, a floor area of 8,222 square metres, and a reinforced concrete frame made to look like a Tang high-platform pavilion. Nothing of the Northern Zhou or Tang structure is in it. The view, though, is the one the site has always offered: a wide river, flat land, and mountains standing back from both.

Rebuilding a famous tower is a research project before it is a building project. In March 1992 an inspection covered five provinces and four cities, some eight thousand kilometres of travel, to study other towers before this one was designed. What came of it is a modern structure in an old shape, and the honest way to see it is as two things at once: a platform where the poem's view can still be had, and a statement of what the region believed the lost tower looked like. The old site had already gone under. In the Longqing era of the Ming the Yellow River broke through and buried it deep in sediment.