The pavilion stands on the north-west edge of Nanchang, on the east bank of the Gan River. The building that visitors see today was put up in 1989 on the original site, following a sketch left by the architect Liang Sicheng, and it stands nine storeys high in a Song-style timber frame. It is counted together with Yueyang Tower and Yellow Crane Tower as one of the three great towers south of the Yangtze. Almost nothing about it is original: the site is old, the name is old, the shape is a reconstruction.
From the journal
A tower rebuilt, and the sentence that stayed
The Tengwang Pavilion has burned and been rebuilt for centuries. What survived every fire is one line of a preface written in 675.
In the same city · Nanchang ↗Nine storeys of Song-style timber
The line that kept being quoted
What the tower is remembered for is a preface, not a roof. In 675 Wang Bo, one of the Four Eminent Men of Early Tang, wrote a farewell to his friend at a banquet in the pavilion: the site was the old seat of the Prince of Teng, a southern city newly made grand, and Wang Bo catalogued its landscape as a place where heaven had gathered its treasures and where people of unusual ability had appeared. The sentence is short enough to have outlasted the building it praised.
Why a tower, and why here
A pavilion on a river bank is a place to stop and look, and the Gan gives it something to look at. The river runs north through the city and into Poyang Lake, which is why Nanchang is a city of water rather than a hill city, and why Wang Bo's catalogue began with the waters before the people. Read the pavilion from the bank rather than from the forecourt: the reconstruction makes sense as a viewing platform over a river that has always been the city's real subject.
