In the hills of Chating Town, the Xizi Pagoda presents an extraordinary silhouette against the sky: a Qing Dynasty stone tower crowned by a massive, flourishing Chinese hackberry tree. Built from granite in 1838, this hexagonal, five-story structure originally served a deeply specific cultural purpose. It was a specialized furnace for burning paper bearing written characters. In traditional Chinese culture, the written word carried profound spiritual weight. Casually discarding a piece of writing was considered deeply disrespectful, and people believed it could bring misfortune. Scholars and locals brought their old texts and practice papers to this pagoda to be ceremonially incinerated, an act of reverence known as respecting the written word.

The pagoda’s story shifted dramatically in 1900 when a lightning strike shattered its roof. In the aftermath, birds resting among the broken stones left behind seeds. A Chinese hackberry sprouted in the masonry. Over the next century, the tree performed a slow, hidden miracle of survival. The pagoda’s architects had designed it with a hollow, double-layered wall system. The tree’s roots navigated this dark, vertical corridor, growing downward through the stone shell until they finally anchored in the soil beneath the foundation.

Today, the structure stands twelve meters tall, with the tree’s umbrella-like canopy adding another seven meters to its height. Visitors can observe the arched doorway on the first floor, bearing the engraved characters for Xizi Pagoda, and trace the alternating doors on the upper levels. Inside, stone steps spiral up to the third floor, while the exterior features gently upturned eaves decorated with bird-shaped stone carvings resembling egrets.

The growing roots eventually threatened to split the granite walls. In 2008, conservation experts carefully repaired the masonry, pruned the roots, and introduced a specialized soil mixture to protect both the stone and the living wood. The site now draws visitors from around the world, particularly at dusk when the silhouette of the stone tower and its leafy crown creates the celebrated local view known as the Jiufeng Sunset. The Xizi Pagoda remains a striking physical record of human devotion to literature, quietly transformed by the persistent force of nature.