Prayer Hall, Towers and Rebuilding at Dongguan Mosque

Dongguan Great Mosque stands on Xining’s East Street, its compound facing east. A Qinghai Station architectural account describes the prayer hall as the main building: five bays across, with brick walls, a single-eave hip-and-gable roof and colored glazed tiles. A gilded finial in Tibetan style rises from the ridge. A three-storey Bangke tower and a three-storey moon-viewing tower stand before the hall, with successive gates marking the approach. The architecture is legible through its parts: a broad courtyard, a central hall, paired towers and a roofline that gathers several regional visual references.

The arrangement makes the mosque more than a façade seen from the street. Its central prayer space anchors the compound, while the towers and gates give the approach a measured sequence. In Xining’s east-side streets, this is a landmark whose form is read through the courtyard as much as through its roof.

The same account dates the mosque’s first construction to 1380, during the Hongwu era. It also records how the complex changed through later upheavals and repairs: rebuilt on its former site in 1913 and completed in 1919, it underwent major repairs and expansion in 1926 and 1946, followed by a large expansion in 1999. The sequence sets the prayer hall within a longer architectural history rather than treating the present compound as a single untouched structure.

A Ministry of Culture account places Dongguan Great Mosque alongside Ta’er Monastery and Beishan Temple in a description of Xining’s religious landscape. That urban frame becomes concrete here in brick, timber, tile and towers. The mosque’s history belongs both to a neighborhood street and to the successive generations who rebuilt and enlarged its central place of worship.