Pavilion of Prince Teng (Tengwangge tu 滕王閣圖)

Description

The Pavilion of Prince Teng, in China’s Jianxi Province, was first erected in the seventh century by Li Yuanying, a brother and uncle of emperors. Fire, structural failure, war, and flood have repeatedly destroyed the Pavilion, which has been rebuilt twenty-nine times.

Its most recent iteration, erected in 1989, is made of reinforced concrete. In all its incarnations, the Pavilion has maintained both its name and its status as an architectural paragon. The historical identity of the tower is guaranteed by the site’s evocation in a poem, The Pavilion of Prince Teng, and its preface; the latter is the text inscribed on this painting. Both texts were composed by the poet Wang Po when the first Pavilion was only twenty years old.

As a conceptual tradition, the Pavilion of Prince Teng is associated with, but not reducible to, the structure that stands today in Jianxi Province. Though one can photograph the building that presently fills the role of the Pavilion, the historical record preserved on silk and paper comes closer to representing the Pavilion’s meaning.