A Pagoda Built to Quell an Omen, 1606

The record

三十四年丙午，正月二夜，县西北隅有赤光一道，直抵东南。知县徐良彦即其地建浮图以镇之。详《永寿寺记》。

Translated: In the thirty-fourth year, bingwu, on the second night of the first month, a single streak of red light appeared over the north-western corner of the county, reaching straight to the south-east. The magistrate Xu Liangyan built a pagoda on that spot to quell it. See the Record of Yongshou Temple for detail.

Time and place

The events belong to the second night of the first month of 1606, the thirty-fourth year of the Wanli era. The place is the north-western corner of the county, where the red light was seen.

The building of the pagoda

The magistrate Xu Liangyan built a pagoda on the spot where the light was seen, to quell it. The gazetteer adds that the detail is in the Record of Yongshou Temple, which shows that the pagoda belonged to Yongshou Temple — the building known today as the Yongshou Temple Pagoda. The gazetteer gives neither its form, its number of storeys nor the time taken to build. The Jiangsu provincial list of protected sites records the Yongshou Temple Pagoda as of the Ming period, in Baota Park, Yongyang Subdistrict, which agrees with the period given in the gazetteer and places it in the north-western part of the county.

On the omen

The red light over the north-western corner of the county belongs to the gazetteer's records of natural anomalies. Recording an anomaly and then attaching a human response to it — here the building of a pagoda to quell it — is a common device of the old gazetteers. Whether such a light appeared cannot be verified; this entry repeats the original wording, keeps the omen and the building of the pagoda in separate sections, and does not treat the omen as established proof of the cause of the building.

Uncertainties

First, the red light is an anomaly that cannot be verified. Second, the gazetteer puts the light and the building in one entry and does not distinguish whether they fell in the same year. Third, the original scale of the pagoda and its later repairs are not recorded in the sources consulted here.