Separate the tower from what surrounds it
The Big Wild Goose Pagoda stands inside the Ci’en Temple compound in the south of Xi’an. It is a Tang building standing among structures that are not, and the two are easy to blur in a single visit.
The Xi’an Local Chronicles Office records it as a first-batch national key cultural relic. That designation is about the tower. Almost everything a visitor walks past on the way to it belongs to a different era.
Why the temple was built
The office dates the founding to 648, the twenty-second year of the Zhenguan era. The Crown Prince Li Zhi established the temple in the Jinchang ward of Chang’an in memory of his mother, the Empress Zhangsun, and the court granted it the name Ci’en.
The chronicles record the Tang temple’s scale: 26,570 square metres, thirteen courtyards and 1,897 rooms, including a translation courtyard. Of that complex, nothing above ground survives.
The buildings you walk past are Ming
The temple declined through the late Tang and the Five Dynasties. The office states the position plainly: the temple buildings standing today were constructed from 1458 onwards, in the Ming dynasty, and have been added to since.
That is worth knowing before you arrive, because it changes what you are looking at. The halls are a Ming rebuilding on a Tang site. The reason to be here is the brick tower in the middle of them.
The pagoda Xuanzang asked for
In 652, the third year of the Yonghui era, the monk Xuanzang petitioned Emperor Gaozong for permission to build a pagoda in the western courtyard of the temple. Its purpose is recorded precisely: to house the scriptures, Buddha images and relics he had brought back from the west.
What he got is not what stands there now. The chronicles record the sequence: the pagoda was built five storeys high, was later increased to ten, was damaged in war, and was rebuilt at seven storeys.
So the tower is Tang in origin and not Tang in fabric. It has been rebuilt, repaired and altered since, and the version a visitor climbs is the end of that process rather than the building Xuanzang commissioned.
What the tower is now
The office gives the present measurements: 64.517 metres high, seven storeys, with each side of the base measuring 25 metres. It stands on a square brick plinth 4.2 metres high, on a footprint of about 45.5 by 48.5 metres.
Every storey has an arched doorway on each of its four faces, and a staircase spirals upward inside. On the ground storey the doorways are stone, and the lintels carry line-carved Buddha figures that the chronicles attribute, by tradition rather than document, to the Tang painter Yan Liben.
The names left on it
Passing the imperial examinations in the Tang was marked by inscribing your name at the pagoda. The chronicles record that this practice continued for more than a thousand years, and that 102 steles carrying the inscriptions survive at the temple today.
The tower also entered poetry early. Du Fu and Cen Shen both wrote about it, and the chronicles quote them: one describing a height that crosses the sky, the other a tower that seems to surge out of the ground, standing alone above the celestial palace.
How to read the site
Take the layers in order and the visit makes more sense. The ground and the purpose are Tang. The halls around the tower are Ming and later. The tower is Tang in origin, rebuilt several times, and now measured and documented.
Hours, ticketing and which parts of the compound are open change through the year and with conservation work, so check with the site rather than relying on any published summary, including this one.
