The secret of the world's first wooden tower standing for a thousand years

If you were asked to guess which province in my country has the most ancient buildings, would you say Shaanxi or Henan? Actually, both of the answers I gave earlier are wrong. The correct answer is Shanxi.

Shanxi is known as the "Museum of Ancient Chinese Architectural Art". Among the eight batches of national key cultural relics protection sites that have been announced (a total of 5,058), Shanxi Province accounts for 452, ranking first in the country.

Today we will talk about the tallest and oldest wooden tower building, the Sakyamuni Pagoda of Fogong Temple, located in Ying County, Shanxi Province.

Compared to the famous Sakyamuni Pagoda of Fogong Temple, the name Yingxian Wooden Pagoda is more well-known.

➤ History of the Sakyamuni Pagoda

There has always been controversy about the construction time of the Sakya Pagoda.

In the local gazetteer Yingzhou Zhi compiled by Tian Hui in the Ming Dynasty, it is stated that "Fogong Temple is located to the west of the prefecture. In the second year of Qingning in the Liao Dynasty (note: 1056 AD), Monk Tian was ordered to build it. In the fourth year of Mingchang in the Jin Dynasty (1195 AD), it was expanded and completed." However, no relevant documents were found in the Liao Dynasty. However, this is now often used as the basis for the construction date of the Sakyamuni Pagoda.

➤ Buddhist culture of Liao

The Liao Dynasty was a dynasty founded by the Khitan people (a nomadic people). The Khitan people did not originally believe in Buddhism. They were intentionally recruited by Yelü Abaoji (later Emperor Taizu of Liao), a tribal leader in the late Tang Dynasty, in order to win over the Han people and unify neighboring tribes.

In 938 AD, according to the agreement between Shi Jingtang, the founding emperor of the Later Jin Dynasty (the governor of Hedong in the Later Tang Dynasty) and Emperor Taizong of Liao (the son of Emperor Taizu of Liao), Shi Jingtang ceded the Sixteen Prefectures of Yanyun to the Khitan.

The Sixteen Prefectures of Yanyun, where Buddhism was already prevalent, further promoted the development of Buddhism in the Liao Dynasty and gradually developed into the center of Buddhist culture in the Liao Dynasty.

The nine emperors of the Liao Dynasty all respected Buddhism to varying degrees. During the reigns of Emperor Shengzong, Emperor Xingzong, and Emperor Daozong (983-1100), Buddhism in the Liao Dynasty reached its peak. The Sixteen Prefectures of Yanyun included Yingzhou (now Ying County, Shanxi Province), and the Sakyamuni Pagoda was initiated by Empress Xiao (empresses in the Liao Dynasty had to change their surnames to Xiao) during the reign of Emperor Xingzong of Liao. This explains why the Sakyamuni Pagoda was built in Ying County.

From the outside, the Sakya Pagoda has five floors; in fact, there is a dark floor between every two floors, for a total of nine floors.

Different colored Buddha statues are enshrined in the five layers. These colored Buddha statues are strong and dignified. The statue of Sakyamuni on the first layer is the largest indoor statue in my country, 11 meters high, decorated with gold and painted. The Buddha's eyes are slightly open, with a dignified look, long fingers on both hands, the right hand is in the fearless mudra, and the left hand is placed on the left knee with the palm facing up in the mudra of giving wishes.

There are also dragon patterns on the Buddha's robes - the dragon was a symbol of imperial power in ancient times. As a pagoda with a royal background, the Buddha statue in the Sakya Pagoda is wearing a "dragon robe", implying that the royal power is granted by God and cannot be shaken.

➤ Mortise and tenon joints and brackets

In our impression, ancient Chinese buildings are not very tall. Most of them are built with an advantage of floor space and a majestic roof to show the style of the building. However, the Sakyamuni Pagoda, a wooden pagoda built a thousand years ago, is 65.86 meters high (satellite measurement data in 2006), which is equivalent to a 20-story building today.

What is even more amazing is that, apart from the brick and stone base and the iron finial, the entire structure of the Sakyamuni Pagoda is made of pure wood without a single nail or rivet. The mortise and tenon structure, which contains the wisdom of our ancestors, has brought its function and beauty to the extreme on the Sakyamuni Pagoda.

Some people may wonder, ancient China already had iron tools, so why didn't they use iron nails in construction?

The reason is simple:

1. In ancient times, metal resources were mainly used in cold weapons (such as spears, arrowheads, etc., after all, defending territory is more important than building houses;

Second, there was no assembly line production at that time, and blacksmiths had to make them one by one by hand;

3. The iron nails in ancient times were pure iron nails. Pure iron is flexible and has good ductility, but its strength and hardness are average, and it cannot even be hammered directly into wood.

Cost trumps everything. The only thing left to do is to focus on the most critical material for construction: wood.

Tenon and mortise came into being. It is a way of connecting two components by combining concave and convex parts. The convex part is called tenon (or tenon head); the concave part is called mortise (or mortise, mortise groove).

Dougong is one of the architectural structures that uses mortise and tenon joint technology. The load-bearing structure that extends out from the beams in layers to form a bow shape between the top of the columns, the lintels and the eaves purlins or the frames is called an arch, and the square wooden blocks between the arches are called dougong. Together, they are called dougong.

The part that we often see under the eaves of ancient buildings or antique buildings is the bracket, which connects the roof and the pillars.

In the Sakya Pagoda, a total of 54 types of brackets are used from bottom to top, so the Sakya Pagoda is also known as the "Chinese Ancient Architecture Bracket Museum".

The Annals of Ying County recorded: "On the 4th day of the 9th month of the 4th month of the 9th year of the Yuan Dynasty, an earthquake occurred in Datong Road with a thunderous sound, destroying 5,800 houses and killing more than 1,400 people"; "During the reign of Emperor Shun of the Yuan Dynasty, a great earthquake lasted for seven days, and all the houses near the pagoda collapsed, except for the pagoda, which remained standing."

In modern times, the Tangshan earthquake also affected Ying County, but the Sakyamuni Pagoda remained motionless after the wind chimes rang for more than a minute. The bracket structure can be said to be the strongest guardian of the Sakyamuni Pagoda standing for a thousand years. Its biggest function is to transmit load-bearing and earthquake resistance.

As mentioned above, brackets connect the roof and columns, linking the upper and lower parts. The loads of the roof and beams are transmitted to the columns through brackets, and then to the ground of the tower base.

In terms of earthquake resistance, the brackets support the horizontal beams. When an earthquake occurs, the brackets' incompletely "locked" splicing structure ensures the building's overall adaptability.

The vibration is transmitted to the beams and roof through the columns. The brackets with mortise and tenon joints consume the energy from the earthquake without shaking and falling apart, which greatly reduces the seismic load of the whole house and plays an earthquake-resistant role.

Under the same earthquake intensity, the anti-seismic capacity of Chinese ancient buildings with brackets on the roof eaves is much stronger than that without brackets . A British TV station once had a documentary on the Forbidden City, in which the earthquake resistance test conducted on the Forbidden City model proved that the brackets evenly supported the weight of the eaves, playing a balancing and stabilizing role.

Dougong is also practical and beautiful. The density of the arrangement of the Dougong, the ratio of the height to the column, and the color decoration all reflect the beauty of the building. The use of gorgeous vermilion, blue-green or gold also contains different meanings.

The Sakyamuni Pagoda is a wooden tower-style building from thousands of years ago. Although it still stands, its "injuries" make everyone helpless: natural disasters and man-made disasters over the past thousand years have caused the tower to twist and deform, and there are more than 100 damaged parts. All the pillars in the tower are tilted, and 12 of them are seriously tilted.

How to save the Sakyamuni Pagoda is a difficult problem, because no one has figured out its structure so far. Whether it is reconstruction or small-scale repairs, the Sakyamuni Pagoda is bound to lose some of its characteristics - its heavy sense of history or integrity.

But if we don’t choose a repair plan that will minimize the damage to the Sakyamuni Pagoda as soon as possible, this thousand-year-old pagoda may really disappear one day...