Late April at Shuangta Park, and a Four-Hundred-Year-Old Flowering

Late April in Taiyuan, and the wind already carried a hint of summer.

I came off the East Middle Ring Road in the middle of the afternoon and walked into Shuangta Park. It is far bigger than I had expected — lawns rolling out in every direction, a water system threading between groups of replica antique buildings, the main path warm and slightly soft underfoot from the sun. And as I walked, my eyes kept being pulled to two towers standing side by side on a rise to the south-east: one a little taller than the other, both the colour of raw brick, glowing in the afternoon light. This is “Twin Pagodas Piercing the Clouds”, one of the eight classic views of ancient Jinyang.

The Twin Pagodas: “Twin Sisters” Two Centimetres Apart

Both are octagonal, thirteen-storey, pavilion-style hollow brick pagodas. The taller one is the Relic Pagoda, properly named Xuanwen Pagoda, 54.78 metres high, and it is said to have taken four years to complete. The other, Wenfeng Pagoda, came earlier, and stands only a little lower. Sixty metres apart, they are the largest, best-formed and tallest surviving pair of brick pagodas in China.

Looking up from the base will make your neck ache. The eaves are edged in peacock-blue glazed tiles, the tower body tapers noticeably above the seventh storey, and the finial is a bottle-shaped cap of copper and iron. The bricks were ground smooth; brackets, rafters and architraves were all cut and fitted in brick. From a distance it reads as timber; up close you realise it is brick through and through — and brick imitating timber this convincingly deserves to be examined at arm’s length rather than from across a lawn.

Yongzuo Temple: A Monastery Without a Single Beam

The temple was founded in the twenty-seventh year of the Wanli reign — 1599 — and is a Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the National Level. It is also the only monastery in China built entirely of beamless brick structures imitating timber. The Mahavira Hall, the Sansheng Pavilion, the meditation hall, the guest hall, the abbot’s quarters: all of them are brick vaults, with no beams, purlins, rafters or pillars at all.

The first thing you notice inside is the quiet. The vaults press sound down low; light slants in through the doorway and lands on the brick floor. Brick imitating timber easily turns flat, so the craftsmen compensated in the details: eaves, brackets, architraves, laid up brick by brick until, standing in the middle of the hall looking up at that vault, you forget you are looking at a pile of bricks.

Zixiaxian: a Peony Four Hundred Years Old

Someone I came with reminded me to look at the peony in front of the Mahavira Hall. Named “Zixiaxian”, it is the only confirmed Ming-dynasty peony in China and the oldest surviving “temple peony”. The flowers are single-petalled, the petals large and heavy, each bloom the size of a bowl — and it opens earlier than any other, right at the turn of spring into summer.

It was at its peak on the day I went. The deep purple discs still carried a trace of red not yet faded, and the named varieties beside it were open too; temple and park together are said to hold more than twenty thousand plants. No wonder Taiyuan makes for this place every late April: the peony festival has run for decades, and Zixiaxian is always its star.

One More Thing

The park broke ground in May 2020 and opened in July 2021 — 89.6 hectares of new city park built around a temple more than four hundred years old. There is something quietly good about a modern garden that makes room this way for old buildings. When I left, the light was going; the last layer of it slipped off the brick, and the two pagodas turned from brick-yellow into silhouettes.

Next time I want to come in autumn, just to see the beamless halls in slanting light.