Tran Quoc Pagoda
Island pagoda over fifteen hundred years old, moved stone by stone to escape a crumbling riverbank.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Tran Quoc Pagoda traces its move in the early 1600s, when monks dismantled the thousand-year-old temple stone by stone to save it from a Red River bank that floods kept eating away, and relocated it onto its current island in West Lake. The eleven-story brick tower behind you holds more than sixty small statues of the Buddha of Infinite Light in arched niches up its face. Behind it grows a bodhi tree, a gift from India's president in 1959.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
West Lake
Vast freshwater lake ringed by temples, home to a pagoda that fled a flooding river by relocating onto its own island.
One Pillar Pagoda
Wooden shrine shaped like a lotus, balanced on a single stone pillar rising from a pond.
Chùa Kim Liên
Lotus-shaped wooden pagoda on a Ly-dynasty princess's former palace grounds beside West Lake.
Huong Pagoda
Limestone cave shrine reached by boat and a steep climb, marked by a lord's carved inscription.
Chùa Thầy
Eleventh-century pagoda on a limestone hillside, birthplace of Vietnamese water puppetry beside a pond pavilion.
Chùa Quán Sứ
Fifteenth-century Buddhist temple built beside a royal guesthouse for foreign envoys, now headquarters of Vietnam's Buddhist Sangha.