Three Hundred Metres South of the Temple

Leave Dule Temple by its gate and walk three hundred metres due south; the White Pagoda (白塔) stands in the south-west corner of the old town of Jizhou. It was originally part of the temple rather than a separate monument, and the two are still read together. Its shape is unusual enough to be worth a second look. The lower part is built as a dense-eave tower, with tier upon tier of brick eaves, and the upper part is finished as an inverted bowl. Chinese architectural writing treats that combination as one of the stranger examples among the Liao pagodas, a form assembled from two traditions rather than grown from one.

The pagoda's date has been argued over with whatever method each period had. Tradition holds that it was first built in the Sui dynasty and rebuilt in the fourth year of Qingning under the Liao, in 1058. Carbon-14 dating of the timber inside the structure supported the older claim, placing the first construction more than 1,400 years ago, in the Sui. In 1533, in the twelfth year of Jiajing, a Guanyin temple was built in front of it, and because the body of the pagoda was white the whole compound took the name Guanyin Temple White Pagoda. Damage from the 1976 earthquake was repaired by a major overhaul in 1983.

What repays close looking is the foot of the tower. The lower base is laid with granite blocks; above them the builders raised a brick imitation of a wooden Sumeru throne (须弥座), the stepped pedestal that carries an image in temple furniture. Inside the recessed panels of that throne are relief figures of musicians and dancers, and historians of music treat them as evidence for Liao performance practice. Liang Sicheng came to Jizhou in 1932, and in his account of the Guanyin Temple pagoda he describes climbing to the upper floor of the neighbouring pavilion to see the eleven-faced Guanyin and then the town beyond it.