A 2018 YunnanNet heritage feature describes the pagoda as built entirely of sandstone and formerly part of Miaozhan Temple’s complex. Four arched openings in its square base meet at the center, allowing people and carts to pass through. Its local name, “through-the-heart tower,” follows this unusual spatial experience.
From the journal
Guandu Jingang Tower: A Sandstone Passage
Built of sandstone, the Ming tower lets people pass through four arched openings in its square base.
In the same city · Kunming ↗A Stone Tower Lifted as One: Guandu’s Jingang Pagoda
A square base and four passages
The feature dates construction to 1457 and gives the tower a height of 16.05 metres. Above the base sit five towers: one larger central form and four smaller corner towers. Reliefs, figures and architectural tiers reward close looking, while the open base makes movement part of the design.
The site belongs to Guandu’s older history as a Dianchi-side settlement and crossing, but this surviving structure is a specific Ming Buddhist monument. Its conservation story should be told through measured structure, stone fabric and inscriptions, not the later folk tale that rice paste built the tower.
The tower’s design combines a monumental base with a compact upper group. The base measures 10.4 metres on each side and stands 4.7 metres high; the central tower rises above four smaller corner towers. The feature describes carved guardian figures, Buddha niches and stacked circular elements, making the monument readable as a layered composition rather than an undifferentiated silhouette. The four openings also matter socially: they made a religious monument part of a route through the old settlement. The surviving inscription record attributes construction to local official sponsorship and Buddhist merit-making, placing devotional purpose alongside public authority. These are the kinds of details that allow a conservation story to move beyond age alone.
The base and upper towers also invite two different scales of looking. From a distance, the five-part silhouette establishes the pagoda in Guandu’s square; at close range, the carved surfaces and openings expose the labor of stone construction. The heritage account says the monument was named in its modern administrative sense when listed in 1965, and received national-level protection in 1996. Those dates show that conservation recognition is itself a later chapter. The monument can therefore be read through three timelines: Ming construction, use within a temple precinct, and modern heritage protection.