Ganzhou Ciyun Pagoda

In 1023, during the Tiansheng era of the Northern Song Dynasty, a local devotee named Bao Jun donated one thousand five hundred bricks to build a sacred pagoda in Ganzhou. Another donor, Mrs. Tao, offered twenty strings of cash, while a man named Wang Ren gave four hundred bricks to honor a departed soul. These individuals pressed their names and intentions directly into the wet clay before it was fired. Today, those inscribed bricks form the foundation of the Ciyun Pagoda, a nine-story, hexagonal monument originally standing forty-two meters tall and now reaching forty-nine point nine meters after later restoration.

For centuries, visitors climbed the tower using a unique architectural pathway. They walked through the thick brick walls, stepped onto the exterior wooden balconies, and circled the tower before climbing higher. The Northern Song poet Huang Tingjian climbed these steps, listening to the wind whistle through the open arches.

Disaster struck in 1906. A lightning bolt ignited the wooden exterior, leaving only a hollow, blackened brick core standing against the sky for nearly a century. The tower remained a silent shell until 2004, when the local government funded a major restoration to rebuild the wooden eaves and corridors.

During this restoration, workers discovered a hidden alcove sealed inside the northwestern wall of the fourth floor. Inside lay a cache of fragile treasures, untouched for centuries. The dry, dark chamber held a remarkable collection of Buddhist and secular artifacts: sixteen scrolls of paintings and sutras on paper and silk, thirteen wooden sculptures, six clay figures, a bronze figurine, and a cool, smooth qingbai glazed porcelain Guanyin statue, along with hundreds of fragmentary pieces. Many of these items had degraded into delicate fragments. Textile archaeologist Wang Yarong led a team that spent six years stabilizing and restoring these relics, revealing vivid depictions of Northern Song fashion, customs, and religious life.

Now situated within the grounds of the Houde Road Primary School, the pagoda continues to dominate the local landscape. At night, modern lights illuminate its brick carvings and its lotus-bud-shaped iron steeple. Alongside the neighboring Confucian Temple, it forms a historic vista that connects modern viewers directly to the hands that shaped its clay a thousand years ago.