Ganzhou Bajing Pavilion

At the northeast corner of Ganzhou's ancient city wall, a three-story terrace stands where the Zhang and Gong rivers merge into the Gan River. This is the Bajing Terrace, one of the earliest examples of the "eight views" tradition that shaped East Asian urban design.

In the mid-eleventh century, during the Jiayou era of the Northern Song Dynasty (1056–1063), Governor Kong Zonghan—a forty-sixth-generation descendant of Confucius—faced a city constantly threatened by floods. He ordered his workers to cut stone and pour molten iron to secure the foundations, replacing the old earth ramparts with a brick fortress. Atop this wall, he built a wooden pavilion. Kong later painted a map of the panoramic views and, after leaving office, sent it to the poet Su Shi. Su Shi, writing from afar, composed eight poems that helped establish the concept of a city's eight views. Years later, exiled to the south, Su Shi stood on this very platform. He looked at the water and wrote that his previous verses failed to capture even a fraction of the actual beauty.

The wooden structure proved vulnerable to fire. For centuries, the terrace burned and rose again. In 1663, the smoke of incense lit by worshippers before a statue of Lü Dongbin sparked a blaze that consumed the timber. After reconstructions in the Qianlong and Jiaqing eras, fire struck again in 1929. The most devastating loss occurred on July 13, 1976, when a fire in an interior darkroom destroyed the structure along with seven hundred artifacts, including a Western Zhou bronze tripod.

Between 1983 and 1987, the local government rebuilt the terrace. Today, the 28.5-meter-tall structure uses reinforced concrete disguised as natural wood. It features double-layered flying eaves, green glazed tiles, and vermilion pillars. Beneath its base lie more than twenty ancient military hideouts. Visitors standing on the top floor can feel the cool river breeze and watch the two currents collide. The green tiles catch the morning mist, and the ancient bricks beneath remind us of the hands that first bound this hill with iron.