“When we were still some five miles from the town, I suddenly discerned — near the furthest limit the road allowed the eye to reach — what seemed a flashing jewel against a deep violet backdrop: a red-and-white pagoda, its tiered roofs suffused with the gold of the sinking sun and gently cupped by the surrounding hills,” he wrote.
Liang was traveling to Ying County, in northern China’s Shanxi province, with colleagues from the newly established Society for Research in Chinese Architecture, the first private scholarly institution in China devoted to the study of historic architecture. Its researchers had started a year earlier with annual expeditions of two to three months. They located surviving monuments, climbing and measuring them to document the rich architectural history of China.
