六和塔

This guide to the Six Harmonies Pagoda in Hangzhou starts with a puzzle you can solve with your own eyes: count thirteen roof lines from outside, then climb the stairs inside and run out of pagoda after only seven floors. It traces the tower back to 970, when the rulers of the small coastal kingdom of Wuyue raised it on a bluff above the Qiantang River to calm a tidal bore violent enough to wreck boats and farmland, guided in the project by Buddhist monks. Warfare later flattened that first tower, and the brick core standing today was rebuilt in the 1160s, during the Southern Song. The pagoda's name, meaning six harmonies, comes from Buddhist teaching on how people and places should align.