Two Ming Pagodas Above the City

Two brick towers stand above the southern edge of Taiyuan, and they are the shape of the city from a long way off. The temple that holds them is the Twin Pagoda Temple, formally Yongzuo Temple, and both towers are Ming work: the East Pagoda was built in 1597 and the West one in 1612, with the monk Fodeng in charge of the construction. Both are eight-cornered and thirteen storeys high, the lowest storey taller than the ones above and each upper storey a little smaller than the last. The English account gives the West Pagoda as 54.78 metres tall with a lowest floor 4.16 metres round, and the East as 53.3 metres with 4.36 metres; the Chinese account gives both towers as 54.76 metres. The eaves are glazed - emerald green in the English account, peacock blue on the West tower in the Chinese one.

Below the towers the temple keeps a library in stone. About 260 steles stand in its gallery, many of them gathered from temples in the area that have since disappeared, and among them are the Ming Bao Xian Tang collection of old inscriptions, its Qing successor, and a traced copy of a poem by Su Shi. The gallery links the lower and upper courtyards, climbing in curves between them. Near it the beamless hall rises in brick over two storeys, the lower one a main Buddha hall and the upper a hall of the Three Saints; above that upper hall the brickwork of the coffered ceiling steps from square to octagon to circle. The temple's own layout is five courtyards, with the tower court set at forty-five degrees to the rest.

The towers were put up to correct the city's weaknesses. The East Pagoda was built as a fengshui pagoda, on the order of two provincial officials, to make up for a city whose literary fortunes never thrived; it was therefore called the Wenfeng Pagoda. In 1608 the Prince of Jin invited Fodeng, then abbot of Xiantong Temple on Mount Wutai, to expand the temple; by 1612 the West Pagoda - named for the dowager empress's title - and the beamless hall were finished, and the name changed to Yongzuo, meaning an everlasting inheritance. The hall between the two towers was added in the Qing. The towers became the city emblem in 1985, and are not untouched: the West was repaired in 1981-1984, while the East, which had tilted 2.87 metres off centre, was straightened and reinforced in 1995-1996 as a modern structural correction.