Famen Temple

This guide to Famen Temple near Xi'an opens with a secret guarded for over a thousand years using decoys, then rewinds to the storm that broke it open: at two in the morning on August 4th 1981, half the brick pagoda sheared away and crashed into the courtyard below, a tower already cracked by an earthquake five years earlier. It follows the four-year wait before officials decided to excavate the ruin, and the moment in 1987 when workers broke through into a sealed Tang-dynasty passage underneath. Note the rebuilt pagoda now standing where the original one fell.