Henan Kaifeng Fan Pagoda, China

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Fan Pagoda

The Fan Pagoda is located on the high terrace which is 1.5 km southeast to Kaifeng. It is the oldest construction of Kaifeng.

The Pagoda was built in 977, the 2nd year of Tai Ping Xing Guo Period of Southern Song Dynasty. It is said someone with their surname Fan had once lived near the terrace, so people called it Fan Terrace and the pagoda on the terrace was named Fan Pagoda.

During the years of Song Dynasty, it was a more than 80 meters high giant pagoda with nine floors and six angles. But when Zhu Yuan Zhang founded his dynasty Ming, he removed six floors of the pagoda, for the geomancer said the Kaifeng City looked too powerful.

Then, the Qing Dynasty came. In early Qing Dynasty, people added a six-floor mini pagoda on the former giant one, so the pagoda got its special form.

The Fan Pagoda you can see today is 31.67 meters high and made up of blue bricks. There're 108 kind of brick sculptures and more than 7000 Buddha statues in the pagoda. All of them are vivid. There're also 178 valuable Buddhism inscriptions in the pagoda.

As a famous scenic spot of Buddhism, poems and articles left by famous people are everywhere in the pagoda. Among them, the poem wrote by Su Shunqing, a famous poet of Northern Song Dynasty, called Deng Fan Ta Shi is the most famous. It described the giant and beauty of the pagoda with vivid sentences.