Little Wild Goose Pagoda Travel Guide

Brief Introduction
The Little Wild Goose Pagoda is located in the Jianfu Temple in the southern suburb of Xian City, about 2 kilometers to the south of the City Wall.

The pagoda gets its name because it is smaller than the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, although it is more stories high and more important in the architecture history. It was completed in 709 A.D., when Buddhism was firmly established in China. It was built to store the sutras and the figurines of Buddha, which were brought back from India by a famous Buddhist monk named Yijing.

Reaching 43.38 meters (142 feet) high, this multi-eave brick pagoda is thirteen stories tall. It is square on plane and rises skyward in an elegant spindle shape. Above the ground floor, the height of each storey diminishes, rendering a graceful curve to the contour.

Features
The construction of the pagoda is special and we can see that it really is a wonder. Just imagine it stands in Xian where earthquakes sometimes occur, the pagoda base is made from packed earth in the shape of a hemisphere. In case of an earthquake, the pressure can be evenly divided, thus the pagoda has remained standing after over seventy earthquakes. After so many earthquakes, only the pinnacle and the two upper floors (the original pagoda had fifteen stories) have been damaged. Remarkably, cracks in the pagoda which occurred during earthquakes have been closed by quakes that came later.

It is said that the Little Wild Goose Pagoda had lost several stories during an earthquake in the 1500s. However, it still looks complete. It has finer detailing in the brickwork than the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. Above the arched doorways on the first tier are Tang engravings of ivy designs and Buddhist figures. The pagoda is part of a temple complex and monastery. It is also possible to climb to the top of this structure.