May
23
/ 2018
Many children have been warned to be careful around their grandmother’s fine porcelain plates. Those kids may grow up thinking that porcelain is a fragile material which has to be handled with care (or better yet, left alone). It may amaze them to picture a huge tower constructed of that material. But such a construction did once exist in China. The Porcelain Tower of Nanjing was a pagoda constructed by the Ming Dynasty during the early 15th century. This tower, which is part of the larger Bao En Si (translated as ‘Temple of Repaid Gratitude’) temple complex, is sometimes considered to be one of the ‘Seven Wonders of the Medieval World’. Indeed, this pagoda was widely considered to be the
