How high is Suzhou Ruiguang Tower and what's in it?
Ruiguang Temple Tower, commonly known as Ruiguang Tower, is located in Panmen, southwest of the city. 1956 is listed as a cultural relic protection unit in Jiangsu province, and 1988 is listed as a national key cultural relic protection unit.
Ruiguang Tower is located in Panmen, southwest of Suzhou City, Jiangsu Province.
Ruiguang Temple was originally named Fusaiji. According to records, it was built by Sun Quan in the fourth year of Wu Chiwu in the Three Kingdoms (24 1) to welcome the healthy life of monks in the western regions. In ten years, Sun Quan built thirteen more pagodas in the temple to repay his mother's kindness.
According to the chronological characters of treasures, Buddhist scriptures, stone buddhas, stone foundations, tower bricks and other cultural relics found in the tower, as well as the plane, structure and appearance of the tower, this tower was built from the first year of Jingdezhen in the Northern Song Dynasty (1004) to the eighth year of Tiansheng (1030), when the Buddhist temple was named Ruiguang Temple.
Temples were destroyed and restored. In the Southern Song Dynasty, Xi Chun, Hongwu, Yongle, Tianshun and Jiajing Chongzhen in the Ming Dynasty, and Kangxi, Qianlong and Daoguang built pagodas in the Qing Dynasty. In the tenth year of Xianfeng in Qing Dynasty (1860), temples were destroyed and towers were preserved. In the 11th year of Tongzhi (1872), it was renovated with nine floors.
Ruiguang Tower is also called Ruiguang Temple Tower or Ruiguang Academy Tower. Ruiguang Temple, formerly known as "Fusaiji", is one of the famous Buddhist temples in Suzhou in the fourth year of the Three Kingdoms (24 1), when a monk came to Suzhou.
In the tenth year of Chiwu (247), Sun Quan built thirteen pagodas in this temple to repay his mother. After the Five Dynasties, Tianfu was rebuilt in the second year of the Jin Dynasty (937), and the top of the tower was given a bronze medal. During the reign of Song Xuanhe (1119-125), it was rebuilt to seven grades and was named "Ruiguang Temple". Legend has it that the tower is often decorated with five colors of auspicious light, so it was renamed "".
After many renovations in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, today's temple has long been abandoned, only this tower has been preserved, and it is planned to be one of the "Panmen Three Scenes" in southern Suzhou.
Ruiguang Temple Tower is a seven-story and eight-faced brick and wood pavilion. The brick tower body consists of three parts: the outer wall, the cloister and the tower center. The external wall is a brick-wood bucket arch with wooden waist eaves and seats. Divide each side into three rooms with pillars, and pay attention to opening the pot door or hiding the straight window.
There are doors on all sides of the ground floor, doors on all sides of the second and third floors, and doors staggered up and down on all sides of the fourth and seventh floors. Circular inclined columns with rolling brakes are built at the inner and outer corners, and the stigma is supported by a bucket arch. There are three arches at the corner of the external wall, and two flowers are laid on each side of the gap below three floors, and more than four floors are reduced to one flower. There are more than 380 wooden brick arches in the whole tower, including waist eaves, flat seats, secondary steps, inner walls, tower core columns, algae wells, doorways and shrines. After the repair, the height of the tunnel is about 53.6m, and the bottom external wall faces11.2m.. The height of the floor decreases step by step, the surface area converges accordingly, and the outer contour is slightly curved, which looks delicate and soft.
When entering the tower gate, the corridor crosses the road. The two walls of the corridor are connected by wooden beams and the floor is laid. The corners of the second and fourth floors are paved with inclined columns, the moon beam connects the inside and the outside, and the wooden ladder for climbing the tower is built in the corridor. The first to fifth floors of the cloister are octagonal tower core brick columns, and the bottom floor is Sumitomo style. The sixth and seventh floors are replaced by a group column frame wood structure composed of columns, foreheads and inclined beams on the ground. The roof truss and brake body at the top of the tower are supported by vertical brake rods at the center of the inclined beams and on the big stiles. There are 24 columns at the bottom of the tower, bearing octagonal abutment, surrounded by bluestone Xumi Mountain, facing 23 meters, carved with lions, beasts, figures, ruyi, walking clouds, etc., which are concise, smooth, vivid and natural, and can be called the masterpiece of stone carving in Song Dynasty. On the east side of the abutment, there is a horizontal rectangular platform protruding, and the front is paved with pedals.
The brick tower body of this tower is basically the original structure of the Song Dynasty. Although the wooden frames on the sixth floor, the seventh floor and the top of the tower were rebuilt by later generations, the frame structure with columns is rare in existing ancient pagodas. The third floor is the core of the whole tower, with a beam-shaped tower foundation. At the four corners, there are plastic remnants of the red and white pastel walls of the Song Dynasty, such as "seven plants and eight hundred flowers" and "broken branches", and melon-shaped pillars, foreheads, niches and kettle doors.
1978 The hidden cave "Tiangong" where precious cultural relics were found is also in the heart of the tower. The practice of "Yongding column" in the center of the bottom tower is rare in existing ancient buildings, which provides a physical basis for studying the "architectural style" in Song Dynasty. Ruiguang Temple Tower is a mature representative of the pavilion-like wooden tower with brick and wood structure in the Southern Song Dynasty, and it is an important example to study the evolution and construction technology of this kind of ancient tower.
The Ruiguang Tower is a pavilion-style building with mixed bricks and wood, with an octagonal plane and seven floors in total. The tower body is made of bricks, which consists of three parts: the outer wall, the cloister and the tower center. The base of the tower is a stone Sumi Mountain base, and the waist around the base is engraved with lions, beasts, flowers, moiré and other patterns.
Each floor of the tower is surrounded by wooden eaves and flat seats, and each side is divided into three rooms by columns, with pot doors or straight windows in the middle. There are four doors in the north, south, east and west of the basement, eight doors in the second and third floors, and one staggered door above and below the fourth floor.
There is a circular leaning column at the corner of the tower, which is connected with the forehead, and it is covered with five shops to make a double-copy bucket arch. The existing tower is still 42.44 meters high, the height of each floor decreases in turn, and the plane diameter of each floor also converges in turn, which makes the outline slightly arc-shaped, simple, delicate and soft, delicate and straight, and retains the architectural style of the ancient pagoda in Tang and Song Dynasties.
1in April, 978, a number of precious cultural relics from the Five Dynasties and the early Northern Song Dynasty were found in the brick niche in the center of the tower on the third floor, including two bronze and gold-plated towers, nine statues of the earth, Guanyin, Buddha Bodhisattva statues, calligraphy scrolls of the Five Dynasties, woodcut lotus sutras of the Northern Song Dynasty and lacquer boxes embedded with scriptures in Luodian, especially a "real pearl relic treasure house".
These cultural relics are of great value to the study of social development and artistic achievements in the Song Dynasty, and also prove that the existing brick tower is a relic of the second year of the Northern Song Dynasty (1009).