Song Dynasty Architecture

Can you imagine two stone towers surviving a Magnitude 8.0 earthquake? No reinforced concrete. Just granite. Built 800 years ago, without computers or formulas for structural mechanics — relying only on the hands and eyes of craftsmen. The Twin Pagodas of Quanzhou’s Kaiyuan Temple — Zhenguo and Renshou — did exactly that. On December 29, 1604, a Magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck Quanzhou Bay. Countless houses inside and outside the city collapsed. Even the government office buildings were destroyed. But the two stone pagodas stood amid the ruins, unmoved. Not luck. Design. ...

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”? ...