琶洲塔
Octagonal Ming-dynasty brick tower once guiding merchant ships up a shifting river toward a hidden port.
Pazhou Pagoda in Guangzhou was finished around the year sixteen hundred, late in the Ming dynasty's Wanli era, and the guide opens with the problem it was built to solve: how a foreign sea captain with no charts or lighthouses could find a city hidden upriver behind sandbars and bends. It follows the reasoning behind giving a Buddhist stupa a second, hidden job as a navigation marker, and the string of towers along the Pearl River that together guided ships toward the Whampoa anchorage. Even the choice of this particular knoll, picked by geomancers for its fortune, turns out to serve a practical purpose too.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.