Porcelain Tower of Nanjing

Hans Christian Andersen's 1839 fairy tale "The Garden of Paradise" has a youth named East Wind flying home from the East and telling his mother, "I came back from China, where I danced for a spell around a tower of porcelain and rang all the bells." The tower of porcelain bricks in the Danish author's fable was not a fabrication of his creative imagination.

The Porcelain Tower of Nanjing, considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Middle Ages, was built in the early 15th century by the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty and rose from a 97-foot octagonal base to a height of 260 feet. This gleaming nine-story pagoda rose over Nanjing's south bank of the Yangtze River for more than four centuries before being destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion in the 1850s. Its ruins went virtually neglected until 2010, when a billionaire made a $156 million donation (the largest single donation in Chinese history) to reconstruct the medieval icon.

Address: 2Q5M+Q84, Saozhou Ln, Qinhuai District, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China, 210006

Opened: 1431