Published: April 2014
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At the Jesuit-run Tushanwan Orphanage in Shanghai, the teenage woodworking students of Brother Aloysius Beck, SJ, crafted balsawood replicas of some of China’s famous pagodas between 1911 and 1915. Eighty-six of the models were transported to San Francisco for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition and never returned.
Last summer, assistant professor of history Jeremy Clarke, SJ, visited the Tushanwan Museum, built on the site of the former orphanage. The museum, he learned, was searching for the pagodas. To help, Clarke assigned his undergraduate students to trace the pagodas’ whereabouts from 1915 to today. The students located the pagodas—83 of them—in a Boston-area warehouse. (A fuller account of the pagodas’ travels and the students’ quest awaits in the spring issue of Boston College Magazine.) With Clarke, the students curated an exhibition of three of the pagodas in the O’Neill Library foyer. The photographs below were taken by Lee Pellegrini.
The exhibition Lost Pagodas Found: From Shanghai to Boston opened at O’Neill Library on April 3. In this photo taken earlier that day are (from left) the Great Pagoda, the Thousand Buddha Pagoda, and the Six Harmonies Pagoda.
Detail from the 60-inch model of the Six Harmonies Pagoda. The original is a 13-story brick-and-wood structure on the Qiantang River in eastern Zhejiang Province.
Detail from the model of the Six Harmonies Pagoda. The actual structure was built in 970.
Detail from the model of the Six Harmonies Pagoda.
Detail from the model of the Six Harmonies Pagoda.
To the left of the Six Harmonies Pagoda is a 40-inch model of the nine-story Thousand Buddha Pagoda.
Detail from the model of the Thousand Buddha Pagoda. According to the 1915 San Francisco exhibition catalogue, the actual building was constructed in Beijing during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Beyond that, its location is a mystery.
Detail from the model of the Thousand Buddha Pagoda.
Detail (right) from the 66-inch model of the Great Pagoda. The actual structure is 250 feet tall and constructed of brick and wood. It is located in eastern Jiangsu Province, and was built in 1160.
A carving on the first-story eave above the entryway of the Great Pagoda model depicts a scene from the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West (1592).
Journey to the West detail.
