The Chinese Worldview in Three Objects

China is a place where the past walks beside the present, receding but never disappearing. Three artifacts that reflect this are dragon screens, pagodas, and city walls. They are not simply physical structures. They form an architecture of Chinese authority, belief, protection, and thus identity. They are symbols that explain a worldview.

Dragon Screens

Datong Nine Dragon Screen (www.westchinatour.com)

Dragons are powerful creatures in China. Unlike Western tradition, Chinese dragons are good omens. Symbols of authority and strength, protectors and bringers of wealth and good fortune. They live deep in the water and high in the sky connecting heaven and earth in the traditional Chinese Daoist universe.

Imperial dynasties adopted the dragon as a source and mark of power and authority. The emperor was the Dragon Visage who rode in a Dragon Carriage and sat on the Dragon Throne. He wore Dragon Robes and slept in a Dragon Bed. The five-clawed dragon is reserved for the emperor.

Dragon screens are detached, exterior walls that were placed in front of Imperial residences both to project authority as well as ward off misfortune and evil spirits, that can only move in straight lines. Because the number nine represents good fortune and long life, nine dragon screens were the most auspicious. Only a handful remain.

Datong Nine Dragon Screen (photo by author)

In Datong, a north China city, a Nine Dragon Screen from the late fourteenth century survives as the oldest and largest such structure in the country. This Ming Dynasty screen graced the entrance of the prince’s mansion here. Rising twenty-four feet, the dragon screen stretches almost 150 feet and is six feet thick. Ceramic dragons soar between earth and heaven. A green wave rolls along the bottom as it meshes with an expansive blue sky above. Myth and power speak.

Even now, the dragon remains shorthand in China, if not more muted than in the past, for the authority of the state and a belief that power is both inherited and divinely supported yet also earned.

Pagodas

Wenfeng Pagoda, Tianning Temple, Anyang (photo by author)

Pagodas are Buddhist. Buddhism came to China from India a millennium ago and fast became an integral part of Chinese imperial society. It remains a vibrant force in China to this day. Pagodas are ancestors of Indian stupas and are reliquaries for relics of the Buddha. They assumed a Chinese shape and style over the centuries. The central column symbolizes the Buddhist connection between earth and heaven. Pagodas serve(d) as sacred signs that following the path of Buddhist dharma leads to salvation.

Five Pagoda Temple, Beijing (photo by author)

The Five Pagoda Temple in Beijing dates from the early fifteenth century and is a rare, Indian-style, diamond-throne pagoda constructed of brick and marble. Five small pagodas rise from the top. 1,000+ Buddhas, Buddhist symbols, and animals grace the outer walls. An interior hallway allows for passage around the square, central core with four Buddha statues facing the four cardinal directions.

Porcelain Pagoda, Nanjing - “An embassy from the East-India Company” (1665), by Johan Nieuhof

The Temple of Gratitude Pagoda, more famously known as the Porcelain Pagoda in the West, was built in Nanjing during the same general period as the Five Pagoda Temple., It is gone. This was a massive, octagonal structure of multi-colored glazed tiles and white porcelain bricks with a diameter of almost 100 feet. Animals, Buddhist images, and patterns covered its ceramic sides and reflected the sun’s light. More than 125 lamps along its towering body lit the tower at night.

The top three floors of the Porcelain Pagoda were sheared off by lightning in 1801 before being repaired. Fifty-five years later, the tower was first commandeered and then plundered and destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion. A symbol of foreign religion. A strategic resource for the enemy. Part of the past that became no longer desirable for important-at-the-time, political, religious, and cultural reasons.

Pagodas endure as markers of a spiritual tradition that has survived dynasties, rebellions, revolutions, and reinventions, always reshaping itself to the needs of the moment, staying relevant.

City Walls

Peking City Wall Northwest Corner (Early Twentieth Century)

“Walls, walls, and yet again, walls, form the framework of every Chinese city….There is no real city in China without a surrounding wall, a condition which, indeed, is expressed by the fact that the Chinese use the same word cheng for a city and a city wall.” So said Osvald Siren (1879-1966), a Swedish art historian, in 1924.

Chinese people have employed fortifications for their settlements, villages, towns, and cities for more than 4,000 years. For defensive protection. To control populations. Simple perimeter ditches, low earthen walls, and moats eventually led to wider, taller, and sturdier mounded earthen/stone/rubble barriers. The now familiar, rammed earth walls, often faced with bricks and stones, are synonymous with China. City gates, with and without soaring watch towers, led from the outer walls to the inner walls protecting the elite to the most interior walls enclosing the palace.

North Gate, Xian City Wall (photo by author)

In advance of attacks, food, weapons, and supplies could be relocated inside from the countryside before the gates were sealed. This provided cities with manpower and resources to withstand long assaults and also removed potential resupply sources from the attackers’ grasps. There was a significant downside, however. When crossbows, exploding bombs, fire-launching catapults, battering rams, and cannonballs could not breach defenses, enemy blockades could lead to starvation, depredation, and worse inside the walls.

Beijing’s city walls were intentionally torn down after 1949. Some former city walls have been restored/recreated around the country as cultural attractions. Much of Nanjing’s old city wall remains. Xian’s old city wall has been preserved and is popular with the public.

Modern China no longer builds walls to keep enemies out, but boundaries, enclosures, protections, and controlled gateways continue to serve as governing principles.

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Dragon screens, pagodas, and city walls tell us something essential about Chinese society. Power announced and respected. Belief that flexes and survives. Boundaries drawn, destroyed, and redrawn to shape the world within. These artifacts echo the past in the China of today.