The 1192 Stone Epic: Deep Disassembly of Engineering Precision and Epigraphic Documents of Putian's Sakya Buddhist Pagoda
There’s a pagoda that has been standing on the east side of Guanghua Temple in Putian for over nine hundred years. It’s not tall. 30.6 meters. But its surface carries 78 stone inscriptions — the names and donation amounts of hundreds of Song Dynasty people, spanning from 1192 to 1194, coming from Xinghua Army, Quanzhou Prefecture, and even as far as Lin’an. I stared at this data for a long time. How did a stone pagoda become a Song Dynasty “financial statement”? ...