The tower written about for a thousand years

The tower stands on the west gate of Yueyang's old walled city, above the water: Dongting Lake spreads in front of it, Junshan Island floats opposite, and the Yangtze leans against the city a little further north. It is counted as one of the Three Great Towers of Jiangnan, with the Pavilion of Prince Teng and the Yellow Crane Tower. What a visitor sees now is a pure-wood structure of three tiers of eaves, 19.42 metres tall, held on four nanmu columns that run from floor to roof, the whole joined without a single iron nail. Its roof, covered in yellow glazed tile, curves steeply up like the helmet of an ancient general, and this helmet roof is the largest of its kind among China's surviving ancient buildings. A local tradition ties the site to the third century: Lu Su, a senior general of the Eastern Wu kingdom, is said to have built a tower for reviewing his navy here around the year 215, when Wu and its rivals contested the middle Yangtze. Whether or not the general's review platform stood on this exact spot, a tower has been documented on the wall for some 1,700 years, destroyed and rebuilt again and again. Before the Tang dynasty it served the military; after the Tang it became a scenic spot where men of letters chanted poems and composed rhapsodies.

The essay exists because two officials fell from favour in the same years. In 1044 Teng Zijing was demoted to govern Yuezhou; he repaired the city's decayed tower over 1045 and 1046, then wrote to his friend Fan Zhongyan, the eminent statesman of the Northern Song, to ask for a memorial text, sending a painting of the tower at autumn dusk over the lake. Fan Zhongyan had just lost the capital post of assistant administrator and been demoted to Deng Prefecture in Henan; friends in parallel disgrace wrote to console each other. His answer, dated the fifteenth day of the ninth month in 1046, ran barely 360 characters. It sets the lake in opposite weathers — rain and gloom, calm and light — and turns on the duty of the responsible man: to worry before the world worries, and to rejoice after the world rejoices. The essay made the tower, and calligraphers then made the essay into an object. The most famous surviving copy was brushed by Zhang Zhao, the Qing minister of justice, in the 1740s, carved across twelve panels of rosewood at a magistrate's request, and it is inlaid today in the tower's second-floor hall — the words that made the building famous, readable inside the building they made famous.

The tower's survival has been a matter of luck and money for a thousand years. In 1688 it burned to the ground. A replacement ordered in 1701 was wrecked by a flood before it was finished, and for decades the wall had no tower at all, until a new three-storey structure of nanmu stone-rise, five zhang high, went up in the 1740s with six thousand taels of repair silver. The great rebuilding came in 1880, when the official Zhang Derong moved the whole structure back from the eroding bank more than six zhang, bonded the roof tiles with tung oil and lime, and set the stone revetment and battlements in a paste of rice flour and fine porcelain ash so hard that blades would not bite. Decay and war undid much of it again: by the end of the Qing the tower stood with broken walls and empty frames, and the early republic's patchwork repairs could not keep up with the fighting. A 1932 restoration reset the roof tiling, replaced rotten timber and rebuilt three sides in brick, keeping the old layout inside. After 1949 came the long repair: from 1970 to 1984 the tower was taken apart and rebuilt on the principle of keeping old as old, preserving more than half of the original components. It stands today as the only one of the three great Jiangnan towers still in its original form.