Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v1.c7.s3.t27.4

v1.c7.s3.t27.4

The coloured glaze pagoda of the Dabaoen Temple was built by Emperor Yongle in memory of his mother. This was 80 m in height and nearly 100 m in perimeter with nine floors and eight sides. The cost of the entire work was 2.485 million taels of silver in 20 years with 1,00,000 workers involved in it. From the beginning of Ming Dynasty all the way down to the early Qing Dynasty, the coloured glaze pagoda of Dabao’en Temple, in westerner’s minds, was the most unique landmark in Nanjing and called it the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing. Unfortunately in 1856, the temple was bombed out by Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and laid in ruins until 2004 when the Nanjing government began to make preparations for the restoration of the temple. In 2007, the preliminary work of the Dabaoen Temple Relics Park officially kicked off and around 2008, a long-term archaeological excavation job was carried out by some departments including the Nanjing Museum, during which, a stone box made in Song Dynasty was discovered which had a record of Dānapāla (an Indian translator of Buddhist Sutras) handing out Buddha relics, together with an iron box containing the gilded Asokan pillar made of seven treasures (precious metals). In 2010, this precious Asokan pillar was opened, thus bringing the Buddha’s parietal (usnisa) sarira to light again.