Small Wild Goose Pagoda

You walk through a garden of old trees, and a slender tower comes into view. It is built of gray brick and rises in many close-set tiers. The top looks slightly blunt, as if the final stories were broken off. Birdsong fills the quiet grounds. A faint smell of pine and earth hangs in the air.

This is the Small Wild Goose Pagoda, a companion to the larger tower across the city. It stands in the grounds of an old temple in the south of Xi'an. The pagoda was built between 707 and 709, during the Tang dynasty. It is more than thirteen hundred years old, and it has watched the city change around it the whole time.

Like its bigger neighbor, this tower had a sacred task. It was raised to hold Buddhist scriptures. These texts had been carried back from India by a traveling monk named Yijing. He, like the more famous Xuanzang before him, made a long journey to gather the writings of the faith, and he came home with a great load of them.

Yijing traveled by sea rather than crossing the deserts. He spent years in India and in the islands of Southeast Asia, studying and copying texts and noting the customs he saw. When he returned to Chang'an, the capital, he brought back hundreds of scriptures. This pagoda was built, in part, to store and honor what he carried home.

The temple that holds the pagoda has its own past. It was founded in memory of an emperor a few decades before the tower went up, and it took the name Jianfu, meaning offering blessings. Here Yijing settled to translate the texts he had gathered, turning them into Chinese until the end of his life. The pagoda was the temple's library and its landmark, rising above the low halls and trees.

The tower was once taller than it is now. It began with fifteen stories. Today it has thirteen. The top two levels were lost, and the reason takes us to one of the strange tales of this place: the story of the crack that opened and closed.

Xi'an sits in a region that feels earthquakes. Over the centuries, several strong quakes struck the city. Records say that one of them split the pagoda from top to bottom, leaving a wide crack down its center. Then, decades later, another quake is said to have shaken the tower so hard that the crack closed again, almost as if the building had healed itself.

People of the time saw this as a marvel. Modern engineers see something else: clever design. The pagoda rests on a rounded foundation, packed and shaped so that the force of a quake spreads out instead of tearing the base apart. The tower has swayed, cracked, and settled many times, yet it still stands.

Look at the overall shape. The stories sit close together, and each is a little shorter than the one below. This gives the tower a soft, curving outline against the sky, gentler than the strong steps of the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda. The two towers are often named together as a pair, one bold, one graceful.

Step up to the base and look at the arched doorways at the bottom. Above them, carved into the stone frames, are fine patterns from the Tang age. These doorframes are among the oldest parts of the tower, and they show the care that went into even the smallest details.

In the temple grounds hangs an old bell, large and green with age. There is a saying tied to this place, the Morning Bell of the Small Pagoda, once counted among the famous sights of the region. In the past, the deep sound of the bell rang out across the rooftops at dawn, calling the day to begin.

Beside the pagoda stands the Xi'an Museum, which holds relics found in and around the city, from jade and bronze to seals, coins, and clay figurines, many of them dug from tombs across the plain. Together, the garden, the tower, and the museum make a calm place, a little apart from the traffic outside. Many local people come simply to walk among the trees, practice tai chi, and rest.

Stand back and take in the whole tower one last time. It has bent in earthquakes, lost its crown, and outlived the empire that built it. Still it rises over the trees, slender and patient, holding the memory of a monk who crossed the seas and came home with words worth keeping.