One Pillar Pagoda

In the middle of a small square pond in Hanoi, a round stone pillar stands alone, holding up a tiny pagoda on its head.

The pagoda is square, each side only about 3 meters long. The four corners of its roof curve upward, and on the ridge two dragons turn to face the moon. People of old called this design lưỡng long chầu nguyệt. Around the pond runs a railing of stoneware brick under a green glaze. Seen from the bank below, the whole shrine looks like a great lotus flower that has just risen out of the water.

People in Hanoi call it by the simplest name of all: Chùa Một Cột, the One Pillar Pagoda. But the small shrine also has a lovelier name, Liên Hoa Đài, which means lotus flower platform. It belongs to a pagoda called Diên Hựu. The name is made of two Chinese characters, and it means blessings that last long.

The story of a pagoda on one leg in a pond starts with a dream.

Legend says that in the winter of the year Kỷ Sửu, which was 1049, Emperor Lý Thái Tông had a dream. In it he saw Phật Bà Quan Âm seated on a lotus throne, reaching out a hand to lead him up onto the platform. Quan Âm is the bodhisattva of compassion. On waking, the emperor told his dream to his court officials.

A monk named Thiền Tuệ advised the emperor to build a pagoda. Raise a stone pillar in the middle of a pond, he said, and set a lotus throne for Quan Âm on top of it, just as the emperor had seen in his dream. When the pagoda was finished, the monks walked around it, chanting sutras and praying for a long life for the emperor. The name Diên Hựu, blessings that last long, was born from those circles of chanting.

It is also told that every year, on the eighth day of the fourth lunar month, the emperor came to the pagoda for the ceremony of bathing the Buddha. Monks came to join it, along with the people of the capital, Thăng Long, the city now called Hanoi. The emperor stood on a high platform in front of the pagoda and set a bird free. One small bird shot up into the sky, while countless eyes followed it.

More than half a century later, in 1105, Emperor Lý Nhân Tông had Liên Hoa Đài repaired. He also had another pond dug, called Linh Chiểu, and a stupa raised in front. So the pagoda was far larger than today in the time of the Lý dynasty, which ruled Vietnam from 1009 to 1225. It was a whole complex, with a pagoda, a pond and a stupa.

In 1249, in the time of the Trần, the pagoda was rebuilt on its old foundations. Under the Lê and the Nguyễn, it was restored many more times. The great complex of Lý times slowly disappeared. But later generations kept its shape: one stone pillar holding up a lotus platform.

Then came September 11, 1954. That day was the full moon of the eighth lunar month, the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival. Less than a month remained before the handover of the capital.

Explosives had been hidden under the incense bowl. There was a blast, and Liên Hoa Đài was shattered from the floor up. Who planted the charge is still uncertain. There are many theories and no clear conclusion.

But two things stayed. The stone pillar still stood in the middle of the pond. And the statue of Quan Âm still sat whole close by, having lost only a few of its fitted wooden arms.

On October 10, 1954, Hanoi was handed over. A few months later, the government decided to rebuild Liên Hoa Đài. The task went to the architect Nguyễn Bá Lăng, who then worked at the office for the preservation of ancient monuments.

The pagoda of Lý times had been gone for a long while. What the builders relied on was an old photograph from the French School of the Far East, taken around the end of the 19th century. The French School of the Far East is a French institute that studies the classical civilizations of Asia. From that photograph, new drawings were made. The old stone pillar was kept. The pair of dragons on the roof was remade in its old form. The railing of the shrine was carved after a model at Tam Sơn Pagoda. The carved panel behind the altar followed a model at the Đình Bảng communal house. Both are in Bắc Ninh.

Work began on January 1, 1955. Only 62 days later, Liên Hoa Đài stood on its stone pillar once more. That is why the pagoda today carries the architecture of the Nguyễn dynasty, Vietnam's last royal dynasty, which reigned from 1802 to 1945. It is not the original form of Lý times.

Standing right at the edge of the pond, you can see that the pillar is really two pieces, one set on top of the other. They fit so tightly that they look like a single block. The pillar is 1.2 meters across and about 4 meters tall, not counting the part buried in the ground. At its top, wooden beams hold up the floor of the shrine, like arms lifting a flower.

A flight of 13 steps leads up to the door of the shrine. Inside sits a gilded statue of the bodhisattva Quan Âm, on a wooden lotus finished in red lacquer and gold leaf. Above the statue hangs a horizontal board with three characters: Liên Hoa Đài.

A stele from Lý times once spoke of lotus petals carved on the stone pillar. Those petals are gone now. But seen from a distance, the whole shrine is still a lotus. Some people also find yin and yang here. The square outer frame stands for yin, and the round pillar stands for yang.

In 1962, the One Pillar Pagoda was listed as a national historical and cultural site. In 2012, in the city of Faridabad in India, an Asian records organization named it the pagoda with the most distinctive architecture in Asia. It was not for being the biggest, or the oldest. It was because few places have a single round stone pillar holding up a whole square pagoda above the water.

Nearly a thousand years have passed since the dream of Emperor Lý Thái Tông. The pagoda has been repaired and enlarged, has fallen, and has been raised again. And still, in the middle of that small square pond, the round stone pillar stands alone. It quietly lifts a lotus above its head, like the lotus throne that Quan Âm led the emperor onto in his dream.