Little Wild Goose Pagoda

The Jianfu Temple and Little Goose Pagoda are located about a mile south of the Yong’an, or Southern Gate, of the Xian City Wall. The temple complex was originally called the Xianfu, or Temple of Offering Happiness, and according to local sources it was founded in 684 A.D. as a memorial to the Tang Emperor Li Zhi. Six years later the notorious Wu Zetian, Li Zhi’s widow, deposed Li Zhi’s son and named herself Empress. In honor of her dead husband she renamed the complex the Jianfu (Felicity) Temple. In the eighth century the temple became well-known for hosting a group of scholar-monks who translated the sutras brought back from India by the monk Yiqing. All of the original buildings were eventually destroyed in various wars during the time of the Tang Dynasty or during the great Buddhist persecution of 843–44. The current buildings apparently date from the Ming and Qing dynasties.

The Small Wild Goose Pagoda was built in the temple grounds in 707. Originally it was called the Jianfu Pagoda, but because it resembled a smaller version of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, built farther south from the city in 648, people soon starting calling it the Small Wild Goose Pagoda. Its main function was to house the collections of sutras brought back from India. It was the only structure on the temple grounds to survive the Anti-Buddhist upheavals of the 840s. Originally 15 stories high, the top two stories were knocked all during an earthquake in 1555. According to legend, an earlier earthquake in 1487 split the entire pagoda in two from top to bottom, with a foot-wide crack between the two parts. The 1555 earthquake miraculously reunited the two halves, sans the top two floors. In all the pagoda is said to have survived seventy earthquakes. The pagoda, now 141 feet high, has been repaired and reinforced and it is now possible to climb to the very top.