Zhenguo Temple (Gaoyou, Jiangsu)

Zhenguo Temple is located on the shore of Gaoyou Lake in Yangzhou City, Jiangsu Province.

Zhenguo Temple, also known as the West Pagoda, is known as the "Big Wild Goose Pagoda of the South" and is also known as the Pagoda Bay of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal. It is a national key cultural relic protection unit and a national 3A-level tourist attraction. It is a square seven-story brick tower, 35.36 meters high. The top of the tower is a bronze gourd with the eight characters "good weather, peace and prosperity" engraved on the surface of the gourd.

When the Grand Canal was widened in 1956, the canal was diverted to protect the pagoda. The pagoda was within the widening area. To protect this precious cultural relic, Premier Zhou Enlai made a special approval when approving the plan: give way to the road to protect the pagoda. (There is a small island of nearly 40 mu in the canal, with the Zhenguo Temple Tower standing in the middle.)

The body of the Zhenguo Temple Pagoda is built entirely of blue bricks. It is 25 meters high and has a square shape. The top of the tower is a four-cornered spire with a two-meter-high gourd-shaped copper spire standing upright on the top. There are north and south arches on the ground floor, and there are tower doors from the second to the seventh floors, with small Buddhist niches built on both sides.
There are protruding semicircular brick columns on both sides of the third to fifth-story tower gate, and there are stacked brick eaves between the layers, which clearly retains the architectural style of the ancient towers in the Tang Dynasty. Among the more than 600 ancient towers in the country, it is considered to be the best.

Zhenguo Temple

Post by JUNE BUTLER | Mar 20, 2025