Big Wild Goose Pagoda

The Big Wild Goose Pagoda is the earliest and largest surviving brick pagoda of the Tang Dynasty, which is a masterpiece of Buddhist architecture in the Tang Dynasty and a famous tourist attraction in Xi’an. Big Wild Goose Pagoda, also known as Big Ci’en Temple Pagoda, was originally called Ci’en Temple West Courtyard Fudo, which was built by Xuanzang to preserve the scripture scrolls and Buddha statues brought back to Chang’an from Tianzhu via Silk Road. Built in 652 AD, the seven-story pagoda is 64.5 meters high and is considered a symbol of the ancient capital of Xi’an and is now a World Heritage Site.

The Big Wild Goose Pagoda was a famous tourist attraction in the Tang Dynasty, so there are a lot of inscriptions by literati and scholars, and there are more than 200 inscriptions in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. The Big Wild Goose Pagoda is a pavilion-style brick pagoda with a square cone, formed by an imitation wooden structure with openings, decreasing in proportion from the bottom to the top, with a wooden ladder inside the pagoda for climbing up, and a vaulted doorway on each of the four sides of the pagoda, with a thousand-year underground palace hidden under the pagoda. But until now, Xuanzang brought back the treasures in the end where no one knows, which has also become a big mystery of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda.