Songyue Pagoda

About

The Songyue Pagoda rises within the precincts of the Songyue Monastery upon the slopes of Mount Song in Henan province, central China. Raised in 523 CE during the Northern Wei dynasty, it is the earliest brick pagoda known to survive in China and one of the very few sixth-century pagodas of any kind to have withstood the passage of nearly fifteen centuries.

In 2010 the pagoda was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the Historic Monuments of Dengfeng in the Centre of Heaven and Earth, a site gathering the sanctuaries built across Mount Song to mark what Chinese cosmology long regarded as the central axis of the world.

The form of the tower bears witness to the meeting of two traditions. From the rounded stupa of India the Songyue Pagoda inherits its tapering vertical profile and its function as a reliquary; from the architectural sensibilities of China it takes its sharp courses of brick and the suggestion of timber bracketing. The result is the twelve-sided shaft that distinguishes Songyue from later square or octagonal Chinese pagodas.

Rising about forty metres in height, the pagoda is built of yellow brick bonded with clay mortar, its perimeter narrowing as it ascends in a manner reminiscent of the stupas of Central Asia. The tower stands amid the wooded mountain landscape that has drawn Buddhist and Daoist hermits to Mount Song since the early medieval centuries, near the famed Shaolin Monastery.

History

Buddhism spread rapidly through China during the centuries leading up to the sixth, and the Songyue Pagoda stands as one of the great surviving witnesses to that age of transformation, when wooden monasteries proliferated but few endured. Its construction was undertaken during the brief but artistically influential rule of the Northern Wei, a dynasty that also patronised the rock-cut sanctuaries of Yungang and Longmen. Through the rise and fall of successive dynasties and centuries of monsoon and earthquake, the brick tower has remained substantially intact, its silhouette preserving the earliest visible synthesis of Indian and Chinese sacred form.

Significance

The Songyue Pagoda is honoured as the prototype from which a long lineage of Chinese pagodas would descend, and as a precious survivor of early Buddhist architecture in East Asia. Its inclusion in the Historic Monuments of Dengfeng acknowledges its standing within a sacred landscape that has shaped Chinese religious imagination for millennia.