Hangzhou Hero Tower, Zhejiang

The Tower of Meritorious Officials was first built in the first year of Zhenming in the Later Liang Dynasty (915). It is a brick-built imitation wooden pavilion with a square plan and a total height of 25.30 meters. It consists of a base, a tower body, and a pagoda top. The base is built directly on the rock, with a side length of 5.36 meters and a height of 0.44 meters. There is an underground palace in the center, which is carved out of stone and is 70 cm long, 50 cm wide and 108 cm deep. The tower has five floors and is 22.06 meters high. A doorway is opened in the middle of each side of each floor, with corner columns, supporting columns, ground beams, waist strings, lintels and heavy brackets hidden inside. The Meritorious Officials Tower is an earlier Buddhist pagoda in the Wuyue Kingdom. It is a square brick-and-wood cylindrical pavilion-style tower. Its structure has been newly developed on the basis of inheriting the Tang Dynasty tower form, playing a role of connecting the past and the future. Repaired in 1982. National key cultural relic protection unit.