Four White Towers around Shengjing

East: Yongguang Temple. South: Guangci Temple. West: Yanshou Temple. North: Falun Temple. Each was associated with a white Buddhist tower, forming a four-directional network around Shengjing, the Qing capital now known as Shenyang. The common prefix Huguo means protecting the state, making their relationship with political authority explicit.

Hong Taiji commissioned the group in 1643. Their position extended the city’s order beyond the palace and streets. A tower could serve as a distant landmark, while its temple established a place for religious practice and administration. Together, the sites marked the capital’s four directions.

Each directional name refers to a separate site. Shisheng Temple belongs to another part of Shenyang’s Buddhist geography and is a distinct institution.

The towers use the rounded, inverted-bowl form associated with Tibetan Buddhist stupas. Their temple halls drew on Chinese timber-building traditions. This combination is visible at the scale of shape and structure: a stupa’s mass and a hall’s roofed frame do different architectural work.

The official historical account names Chinese and Mongol officials and a Mongol religious figure among the construction leadership. The network was made through collaboration across the court’s cultural world. Its forms reflect that shared work across traditions.

Historian Song Nianshen adds another kind of detail: the temples’ inscriptions used Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan. In his reading, the four texts addressed different audiences rather than functioning as a single message mechanically repeated. Language, like architecture, helped the court describe its relationship with religious institutions and the people connected to them.

The western tower was reconstructed in 1998 on the original site, following the earlier tower’s form. The earlier tower had been dismantled in 1968; rebuilding restored the western landmark to the city’s four-tower geography.

The sites have also acquired different contemporary roles. A 2024 municipal response records reading spaces at northern Falun Temple and eastern Yongguang Temple, and vegetarian lunches for visitors at western Yanshou Temple. These uses place reading, hospitality and religious life within the older directional network.

The network’s meaning thus operates on several levels. The directional plan belongs to the early capital; surviving and reconstructed structures require their own building histories; present religious and community activities belong to people using the sites now. Xita can therefore name both an old western landmark and a much later neighbourhood: a city’s place-names can outlast, and gather new lives around, the structures that first established them.