Three-storey Stone Pagoda from the Goseonsa Temple Site
Late seventh century
Out on the lawn stands a massive granite pagoda, nine metres tall, three storeys of stone roofs stacked on a broad double base. It is the oldest and grandest object in the outdoor exhibition and it gives the whole campus its scale. Each storey is a block for the body and a separate block for the roof, the roof edges cut in steps beneath and curving gently upward at the corners. There is no ornament except for the shallow door carved on the first storey, where a niche for relics was once closed with a stone panel. The pagoda does not need ornament. Its power is in its proportions.
Pagodas in Korea began as wooden towers in the Chinese manner and were translated into stone in the seventh century, and this one shows the translation in progress. Look at how the body of each storey is built from several blocks fitted together, like timber, and how the corners of the base have pilasters that imitate wooden posts. Later Silla pagodas, like those at Bulguksa, would be cut from fewer and larger stones, more abstract and more slender. Here you can still feel the carpenter behind the mason.
The pagoda stood for thirteen centuries at the site of Goseonsa, a temple in the hills east of the city where the great monk Wonhyo is said to have lived in the six hundreds. In 1975 the valley was flooded for the Deokdong reservoir, and the pagoda was taken apart stone by stone and rebuilt here, together with a stone base for a statue and a stele turtle from the same temple, which stand nearby. Walk all the way round it, then step back to the far edge of the lawn to see the roofs against the sky.
Did You Know? The whole pagoda was moved to save it from drowning; the temple site it came from now lies under the waters of a reservoir.
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