page_title: Baisigou Square Pagoda
section_title: Investigation of the ruins of the pagoda
hierarchical_section_title: Baisigou Square Pagoda / Investigation of the ruins of the pagoda
caption_attribution_description: English: the cover of a Buddhist text in Tangut language, Continuation for Propitiousness Everywhere Reading Edition, printed with Movable type.
context_page_description: Baisigou Square Pagoda was a brick pagoda in Helan County, Ningxia, China, built during the early years of the Western Xia dynasty, circa 1075–1076. It is situated in an isolated location about 10 km into the Baisigou Valley on the eastern side of the Helan Mountains, northwest of Yinchuan, but may have been the site of an important Buddhist temple during the Western Xia. The pagoda was illegally destroyed in 1990; archaeological investigation of the ruins has uncovered a large number of Tangut artefacts and Buddhist relics, including books and manuscripts written in the Tangut language and script.
context_section_description: On 28 November 1990 a local peasant discovered that the pagoda had suddenly collapsed, and when the Ningxia police investigated they discovered that the pagoda had been blown up by unknown criminals, apparently with the intention of stealing any historical relics inside the pagoda. The pagoda was reduced to rubble, with only a fragment of the northwest corner left intact.
  Local archaeologist Niu Dasheng (牛達生) (b. 1933), who worked at the Ningxia Museum, thought that there may be cultural relics at the pagoda, or even an underground chamber like the one found at Famen Temple after its pagoda semi-collapsed in 1981, therefore he organised an expedition to carry out an archaeological investigation of the site and to clear the rubble. In addition to archaeologists, his team included two police officers who were investigating the crime, and twenty or so soldiers from a unit of the People's Liberation Army who were to help move the rubble. In August 1991, after receiving permission from the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, Niu's team headed off to the site of the ruined pagoda, which was several hours from the nearest road, and could only be reached by foot, with donkeys carrying their equipment. The team lived in caves near the pagoda for the duration of the expedition, but there was no source of drinkable water nearby, and so bottled water had to be transported in by donkey.
  On the sixth day the team uncovered a large number of historical artefacts dating to the Western Xia period (1038–1227), including:
  coins;
  wooden knives;
  pieces of silk cloth;
  woodblock Buddhist prints;
  miniature moulded clay sculptures of stupas;
  a bag containing Buddhist relics and fragments of bone;
  miniature moulded clay sculptures of Buddhas (over 5,000 pieces);
  a handwritten scroll 5.74 m in length written in cursive Tangut characters;
  more than thirty printed books and manuscripts in both Chinese and Tangut;
  wooden tablets inscribed in ink with Tangut characters (datable to the period 1102–1114).
  These objects were all concentrated in an area about 2 m in diameter, underneath about 1 m of rubble in the centre of the ruins, and were mixed in with earth, branches, bird carcasses and bird skeletons. The archaeologists determined that the artefacts had been housed in chambers occupying the tenth and twelfth stories of the pagoda, and that as these chambers had an opening to the outside on the south side they had thus been used as a roost for birds.
  The books and manuscripts comprised both religious texts (Buddhist sutras) and secular texts, including the first known collection of Chinese poetry written by Tangut poets. The most important text discovered was a printed edition in nine volumes of a previously unknown Tangut translation of a Tibetan Tantric Buddhist text and commentaries entitled the Auspicious Tantra of All-Reaching Union, which has been identified as being the earliest known example of a book printed using wooden movable type.
caption: Front cover of a volume of the Auspicious Tantra of All-Reaching Union
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