Porcelain Tower of Nanjing: Lost Wonder of Ming China (1412)

The Porcelain Tower of Nanjing was a nine-storey Buddhist pagoda covered with white glazed bricks, built at the Da Bao’en Temple in Nanjing between 1412 and about 1431. Ordered by the Ming emperor Yongle, it was one of the tallest structures in China and became famous among European travellers as a marvel of Chinese craftsmanship. It stood for more than four centuries before it was destroyed in 1856 during the Taiping Rebellion.

Background: a temple of repaid gratitude

The site lay just outside the Zhonghua Gate, the main southern gate of Nanjing’s city wall, south of the Qinhuai River. Buddhist temples had stood there since at least the third century AD, and a pagoda of the Song dynasty, at the Changgan Temple, preceded the Ming tower.

The Yongle Emperor came to the throne in 1402 after the Jingnan Campaign, a civil war against his nephew. In 1412 he ordered the old temple rebuilt on a grand scale as the Da Bao’en Si, the “Great Temple of Repaid Gratitude”. Officially it honoured his parents, the dynasty’s founder, the Hongwu Emperor, and Empress Ma. Some later writers suggested that it really honoured a secondary consort who was his birth mother, but this claim is uncertain.

Building the tower

Work went on for close to two decades. The tower and temple were completed around 1431, under Yongle’s grandson the Xuande Emperor. Traditional accounts say that around 100,000 workers and soldiers took part and that the cost was some 2.5 million taels of silver; these figures cannot be checked but give a sense of the project’s scale.

In 1428 the Xuande Emperor put Zheng He, the eunuch admiral of the treasure voyages, in charge of completing and repairing the temple, during the interval before his final voyage of 1431–1433.

The bricks and tiles were made at official kilns in and around Nanjing. Each element was reportedly fired in several copies, and spare pieces marked with numbers were stored so that damaged parts could be replaced. Some of these spare glazed pieces were later rediscovered and are now in museums.

What the tower looked like

The pagoda had eight sides and nine storeys, tapering towards the top. Its height is usually given as about 70 to 80 metres. The outer walls were faced with white glazed bricks that shone in sunlight, while arches, eaves and decorative panels used green, yellow and brown glazes. They showed Buddhist figures, guardian beasts and other motifs.

Bells hung from the corners of the eaves and sounded in the wind; accounts speak of well over a hundred of them. At night lamps placed on the outside of the storeys, reported as about 140 in number, lit up the tower so that it could be seen from far away. At the top was a finial of gilded metal.

The temple around the tower

The pagoda was the centrepiece of a large monastery, not a free-standing monument. The Da Bao’en Temple had halls for worship, living quarters for monks and a sutra library, and it served as one of the leading Buddhist institutions of the southern capital. Even after the court moved to Beijing in 1421, Nanjing kept a full set of government offices as the dynasty’s secondary capital, and the temple continued to receive imperial support.

Visitors could climb the tower by internal stairs to look out over the city walls and the Yangtze River. Chinese poets and travel writers of the Ming and Qing periods praised the view and the glow of the lamps at night, and the tower appeared in local gazetteers and maps as a landmark of Nanjing.

Myths and facts

Several popular claims about the tower need care. It was not built entirely of porcelain: the structure was brick, faced with glazed bricks and tiles, and “porcelain” was a European label. Nor was it the tallest building in the world; it was, however, among the tallest in China and a striking sight in a city of low buildings.

It is also often said that the tower was a “wonder of the world” in China itself. In fact the famous list of medieval wonders that included it was a nineteenth-century Western invention, not a Chinese one, although Chinese writers did admire it greatly.

Fame in Europe

European travellers to Nanjing wrote about the tower from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards. The most influential account came from Johan Nieuhof, steward of a Dutch East India Company embassy to China in 1655–1657. His book, published in Dutch in 1665 and soon translated into French, German, Latin and English, included an engraving of the “porcelain tower” that was copied again and again.

The image fed the fashion for chinoiserie, European art and design inspired by China. Louis XIV’s Trianon de Porcelaine at Versailles, built in 1670 and decorated with blue-and-white tiles, is often linked to these reports. The Austrian architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach included the tower in his 1721 survey of world architecture. Even Roman festivals borrowed it: in 1758 one of the temporary structures, or macchine, built for the annual Chinea celebration in Rome was designed as a fanciful version of the Nanjing pagoda and recorded in an etching. In the nineteenth century, popular Western books listed it among the “Seven Wonders of the Middle Ages”, alongside the Colosseum and Hagia Sophia.

Damage and destruction

The tower survived for centuries with repairs. A lightning strike in 1801 damaged its upper storeys, which were rebuilt. Its end came during the Taiping Rebellion, the great civil war of 1850–1864. The Taiping movement captured Nanjing in 1853 and made it their capital.

In 1856 the tower was destroyed. Accounts give different reasons. The most common is that the Taipings blew it up to prevent rival forces from using it as a lookout or artillery position over the city; others point to the movement’s hostility to Buddhist images or to fighting within the Taiping leadership. The temple buildings were also ruined, and local people carried off many of the bricks.

Rediscovery and reconstruction

Archaeologists excavated the temple site from 2007 onwards. In 2008 they opened the underground crypt beneath the earlier Song-dynasty pagoda and found an iron casket containing a miniature stupa and Buddhist relics, reported as relics of the Buddha himself.

A large donation from a private developer helped fund a heritage park on the site. It opened in 2015 with a modern steel-and-glass structure that recalls the shape of the lost pagoda. Fragments of the original glazed bricks and arches are displayed nearby and in the Nanjing Museum.

Timeline

• 1402: The Yongle Emperor seizes the throne.
• 1412: He orders the building of the Da Bao’en Temple and its pagoda.
• 1428: Zheng He is put in charge of completing and repairing the temple.
• c. 1431: The tower and temple are completed under the Xuande Emperor.
• 1656: Johan Nieuhof sees the tower with the Dutch embassy.
• 1665: Nieuhof’s illustrated account is published in Amsterdam.
• 1801: Lightning damages the upper storeys, which are then repaired.
• 1853: Taiping forces capture Nanjing.
• 1856: The Porcelain Tower is destroyed.
• 2015: A heritage park with a modern structure opens on the site.

Why it matters

The Porcelain Tower showed the skill of Ming kilns and builders at their height and the Yongle Emperor’s ambition to leave monuments worthy of his reign. For Europeans it became a symbol of China itself, shaping how Western artists imagined the East for two centuries. Its loss in the 1850s also illustrates how much cultural heritage was destroyed in China’s nineteenth-century wars.