Three Pagodas of Chongsheng Temple
Interesting facts
- Restorers in 1978 found a pearl-studded gilded silver Garuda inside the main tower, along with more than 200 vajra ritual implements and thousands of prayer beads.
- An inscription discovered in 1984 on the fourteenth storey of the main tower bears a date corresponding to the year 889.
- The south pagoda hides a narrow inner shaft only 0.8 metres square and nearly 27 metres tall, its walls still marked with the builders' ink lines.
- The two smaller pagodas each stand 70 metres from the central tower and 97.5 metres from each other.
- The Qianxun Pagoda is hollow inside, enclosed at its base by walls about 3.3 metres thick.
- A marble screen wall on its east side is carved with four large characters meaning roughly "forever guarding the mountains and rivers".
- After earthquake damage in the early 16th century, the scholar Li Yuanyang led a restoration completed in 1553 that added stone balustrades around the base.
- Five bronze bells hang from each wire linking the south pagoda's crowning canopy to its top eaves.
- In 1961 the pagodas were among the first sites listed as Major Historical and Cultural Sites Protected at the National Level in China.
Why it is worth it
Three white towers stand in a triangle at the foot of the Cangshan range, looking out over Erhai Lake, just north of the old town of Dali in Yunnan: the Three Pagodas of Chongsheng Temple, the emblem of the region since the days of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms. Seen from a distance against the green wall of the mountains, their pale silhouettes are one of the most recognisable images of south-western China.
The central tower, the Qianxun Pagoda, is a square brick shaft of sixteen storeys about 69.6 metres high, among the tallest pagodas ever raised in China. It was built in the ninth century under the Nanzhao kings, and its closest relative is the Small Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi'an — a sign that its builders looked to the Tang capital. Each storey carries tiers of upturned eaves and a niche with a white marble Buddha on every face. Its two companions, added about a century later, are slender octagonal towers of ten storeys, around 42 metres tall; one of them leans visibly, its foundation having given way. Behind them, a pond named Juying Chi — the "gathering reflections" pool — mirrors all three in still weather.
The pagodas have outlasted the temple that once surrounded them. Chongsheng was the royal temple of the Kingdom of Dali, but it was destroyed under the Qing and rebuilt only in 2005. The towers themselves proved remarkably resilient: records say the Qianxun Pagoda split in an earthquake in 1515 and closed again in an aftershock ten days later, and in the 1925 Dali earthquake, which levelled almost the entire town, they stood undamaged. Restoration work in the late 1970s found more than 700 Buddhist objects inside the main tower, along with copper plates recording repairs in 1000, 1142 and 1145. Local legend holds that the towers were raised to keep the dragons of the old swamps in check.
Getting there
The pagodas stand about 1.5–2.5 km north of Dali Old Town, at the foot of the Cangshan mountains. Dali Fengyi Airport (DLU) is about 19 km away.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Three Pagodas of the Chongsheng Temple are an ensemble of three independent pagodas arranged on the corners of an equilateral triangle, near the old town of Dali, Yunnan province, China, dating from the time of the Kingdom of Nanzhao and Kingdom of Dali in the 9th and 10th centuries.
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