Da Bao'en Temple Ruins Park

The one Nanjing monument many Europeans once knew by name: the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing, the nine-storey glazed pagoda of the Ming Bao'en Temple, which Western writers counted among the wonders of the medieval world and which was destroyed in the Taiping war in the mid-19th century. What stands here now is not that tower. Excavations in the late 2000s found the temple's foundations and a Song-dynasty crypt beneath the pagoda site; heritage rules then ruled out a copy, so in 2015 the city put up a 93-metre steel-and-glass tower over the crypt as a protective shelter, the same shape and proportions as the old one but built of modern materials.