Beneath the shadow of Mount Lushan, a massive stone platform stands as a physical record of war, philosophy, and time. Local memory places this structure on the ancient Han Dynasty platform where the Eastern Wu general Zhou Yu trained his navy in 206 AD.

The physical reality of the watchtower took shape through centuries of destruction and labor. After war leveled the Song Dynasty original, the Ming magistrate An Zhi rebuilt the tower entirely of wood in the late fourteenth century, placing a dripping water clock at its center to measure the passing hours. Decades later, magistrate Chen Minzheng replaced the vulnerable wood with a monumental base of locally quarried granite blocks. Laborers packed the interior with rammed multiflower soil, creating a platform thirty meters wide. Inside this stone mountain, they left bricks stamped with the year 1458, marking their work for the Tianshun emperor.

Above this heavy base, carpenters assembled a brick-and-wood pavilion using interlocking mortise and tenon joinery. They carved clouds, flowers, and birds into the wooden corbels, capping the structure with upturned eaves of green glazed tiles. Through the center of the granite base, they left a vaulted stone tunnel, sixteen meters deep, known as the Gulou Cave. In 1763, the magistrate Liu Fangpu carved a long couplet flanking this archway, invoking the legacy of the scholars Zhou Dunyi and Zhu Xi while noting the strategic landscape between Mount Lushan and Poyang Lake.

Today, the restored watchtower stands next to the historic Ailian Pond. Visitors passing through the cool, echoing vault of the Gulou Cave walk the same path as Han dynasty soldiers, Ming builders, and twentieth-century revolutionaries. The structure remains a quiet observer of Jiangxi's changing landscape.