Seeing the Tower

Who would have imagined that an ancient Chinese pagoda would one day inspire a building in London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, appear in a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, feature on Chinese takeout boxes, and even show up in the video game Civilization V?

The pagoda in question is known in China as the “Glazed Pagoda of the Great Bao’en Temple.” Or, as the Western missionaries, officers, and merchants who saw it during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) dynasties called it: “The Porcelain Tower of Nanjing.”

The pagoda was completed in 1428 at the behest of the Yongle Emperor to commemorate his parents in the then-capital of Nanjing. As one of the tallest buildings in southern China, it quickly became a must-see with its exquisite construction techniques, right up until its eventual destruction in 1856.

While many may find the image familiar, few know how this image was disseminated outside China. As my research team and I discovered through our yearlong global collaboration to sketch out a clearer map of cross-cultural communication, the Glazed Pagoda has been appreciated, studied, and emulated in other countries in a polyphonic process of imagination, reproduction, misinterpretation, and reconstruction. In essence, as the pagoda has shaped global cultural memory, it has also reflected the subtle evolution of power.

The earliest Western records we found regarding the pagoda come from a Portuguese Jesuit and former resident of Nanjing named Alvaro Semedo in 1638. However, it was the Dutch traveler Johan Nieuhof, who visited China with a delegation of the Dutch East India Company in 1655, who truly helped Europeans “see” the pagoda. His diaries contained two illustrations of the Great Bao’en Temple, which highlighted the pagoda’s grandeur using the then-prevalent perspective technique. In 1665, a French version of Nieuhof’s diary was published — however, this rendition added a 10th level to his original depiction of the nine-story pagoda. The addition would define many images of the pagoda for years to come.

Around the time of Nieuhof’s diary publication, many European aristocrats began building structures in the Chinoiserie art style. In 1670, King Louis XIV of France ordered the design and construction of the Porcelain Trianon, which was the first example of Chinese garden architecture in Europe. The building’s facade was covered with imitation-glazed tiles made in European factories, a direct carryover from the Glazed Pagoda.

By the 18th century, Chinoiserie was popular all across Europe. Romanticized images of China were applied to court gardens and decorations, the most famous of which was the Great Pagoda in Kew Gardens, London. Made in 1762 by Sir William Chambers, an architect who had accompanied the Swedish East India Company on a voyage to China, the roughly 50-meter-high Chinese-style pagoda had 10 levels, even though no such design existed in China. Seemingly, despite having visited China in person and seen its pagodas, Chambers was still heavily influenced by the illustration of the “10-story porcelain tower” from the French edition of Nieuhof’s diary when designing the Kew Pagoda.

For Europeans at the time, the “porcelain tower” not only represented a unique architectural style but also tapped into their curiosity about a faraway China and even the East as a whole. In his 1839 short story “The Garden of Paradise,” Danish fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersen regarded the “porcelain tower” as a landmark of China: “I am just home from China, where I danced around the porcelain tower until all the bells jangled.” Andersen had never set foot in China, and yet he used the Glazed Pagoda as shorthand for the country, demonstrating how the building took on symbolic significance.

This significance appeared in furniture and handicrafts. In the collection of the Munich Residence in Germany, there are several embroidered tapestries featuring patterns based on Nieuhof’s pagoda illustrations. In the late 17th century, potters in Delft even created a tulip vase that imitated Chinese porcelain and featured a shape influenced by the Glazed Pagoda. When we interviewed Robert D. Aronson, an expert in the history of Delft ceramics, he told us that for these artisans, the “porcelain tower” might have symbolized an “almost mythic model of balance, repetition and ornamentation.” In essence, they were inspired not only by the form of the pagoda, but also by what he called a “structure of devotion and display, glazed in brilliant blue and white, associated with refinement and spiritual elevation.”

In the 19th century, especially after the First Opium War, the idea of China as “distant and poetic” changed in the minds of Europeans. Chinoiserie gradually fell out of fashion, along with decorative elements inspired by the Glazed Pagoda. And yet, the pagoda remained a representative of China in European imaginations. For instance, in James Reynolds’ “Illustrations of Natural Philosophy” published in London in 1850, he featured the “porcelain tower” — the only building from China in his depiction of the “principle buildings in the world” — alongside the Pyramids of Egypt, the Panthéon in Paris, and the Colosseum in Rome.

During this period, there was also an influx of military and political personnel, particularly from Britain, traveling to China with painters. During the negotiations of the Treaty of Nanking, signed between China and Great Britain in 1842, many British soldiers paid special visits to the Great Bao’en Temple. A watercolor painting overlooking Nanjing from the Glazed Pagoda by Edward H. Cree, a military doctor in the British Royal Navy, differs from previous compositions of the pagoda. In Cree’s version, the viewpoint is high up beside the tower, looking northwest over the city to present the breadth and layout of Nanjing. Many similar pictures are included in British painter Thomas Allom’s series, several of which clearly show that the pagoda had only nine floors.

These in-person drawings corrected the errors proliferated by the French version of Nieuhof’s illustrations. However, this objectivity also reflects the cruel reality of international relations: Against the backdrop of war, the Glazed Pagoda shifted from being a cultural landmark to a geographical reference point. The Glazed Pagoda in these paintings is no longer the sole protagonist as it was in Nieuhof’s prints, but rather a way to more prominently showcase the positions of the pagoda, city wall, and Qinhuai River. In 1882, France published a 1:140,000-scale map of Nanjing based on materials from the British Admiralty, clearly marking the location of what remained of the pagoda, while also highlighting key locations such as a fort, city wall, and imperial city. In this context, the Glazed Pagoda was transformed from a cultural wonder into an object of scrutiny and measurement.

The Glazed Pagoda, as a structure, would be destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion in 1856, with an 1871 photograph taken by British photographer John Thomson showing only the pagoda’s remaining bronze bowl. The “porcelain tower” as a cultural symbol, however, would remain.

Around 1913, apprentices in the Tushanwan workshop — an orphanage and art industrial school in Shanghai — created a model of the pagoda based on available records, under the leadership of Aloysius Beck, the head of the workshop’s woodworking department. In the absence of any video footage of the Glazed Pagoda, this model is now how people envision the pagoda.

Perhaps the most surprising influences of the Glazed Pagoda are to be found in 20th-century pop culture. In 1991, Bhutan issued a series of Disney co-branded stamps featuring Mickey Mouse and other characters exploring the wonders of the world, among which the “porcelain tower” and the Great Wall were chosen to represent “Chinese wonders.” Later on, American developer Firaxis Games featured the pagoda as one of the great wonders of China in the video game Civilization V.

All of this shows how this ancient pagoda, introduced to the West by a Dutch painter in the 17th century and destroyed in a war in the 19th century, continues to find new life in the 21st century. From a Buddhist building in the south of Nanjing, to a symbol of China among Europeans, to a cultural memory shared around the world, the pagoda seems to have found its way into legend.

Portrait artist: Wang Zhenhao.

(Header image: A close-up illustration of the Glazed Pagoda, from the French edition of Nieuhof’s journal, published in 1665. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France)