The Wooden Pagoda at Yingxian: How It Still Stands

The first thing to see is the shape: an octagon thirty metres across, five storeys that step inward as they rise, and a steeple that takes the whole frame to 67.31 metres. All of it is timber. The pagoda stands in Ying County, in the prefecture of Shuozhou, and it is the oldest surviving wooden pagoda in China. Its date is not written in any contemporary document; the usual dating rests on Ming local gazetteers, which put the building in the second year of Qingning under the Liao, 1056. The Liao were the Khitan state that held the north before the Jin, and a repair is recorded under the Jin in 1195. What a visitor sees is therefore a Liao frame with Jin work in it.

Nothing here is nailed. Timber is held to timber by interlocking joints and by bracket sets, the layered arms that carry each eave out beyond the wall, and the tower uses fifty-four distinct kinds of them, the largest number recorded in any Liao building. That variety is also the difficulty: each bracket belongs to its own position in the frame, so no repair can be designed from a single detail. Outside there are five storeys; inside, the first four contain a hidden storey each, and the interior rises through nine levels in all. The whole stands on a stone platform about four metres high. From below, the brackets read as a crowded band of shadow under every eave.

The tower has been hit and has stayed up. In 1926, during the fighting between warlords, more than two hundred shells struck the body of the pagoda; it was badly damaged and did not collapse. Repair is an older story than that: work under the Jin in 1195 followed the Liao construction. The harder problem is the present one. Because fifty-four kinds of bracket are locked into one frame, there is no simple way to take the building apart and put it back, and proposals for its conservation have been argued over for a long time without a settled method. The pagoda at Yingxian is therefore an old structure whose future is still being decided, not a restored monument.

In 1961 the pagoda entered the first national list of key cultural relics, when the State Council named the first batch of sites protected at national level. That listing is the highest status it holds. It is not a World Heritage site. Ying County began work towards a nomination in 2009, the process was formally launched in 2011, and in 2013 the pagoda was placed on China's tentative list for World Heritage consideration, together with the Fengguo Temple. A tentative-list entry is a statement of intent, not an inscription, and the distinction matters here, because the tower is often described as though the nomination had already succeeded. What stands at Yingxian is a first-batch national monument with an open application.