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The Military Terrace and Pavilion of Genuine Prowess is located in the People’s Park in the eastern part of the Rongxian County in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

The Military Terrace and Pavilion of Genuine Prowess was first built in the third year (768) of the Dali reign of the Tang Dynasty (618-907). According to the recordation of literatures, when Yuan Jie, a famous poet and an official in Rongguan, built the Military Terrace for drilling soldiers and enjoying scenery. The Military Terrace is 50 meters long, 15 meters wide and 4 meters high. It is filled up with rammed earth in the center, and built by laying bricks around it, stable and steady. In the tenth year (1377) of the Hongwu reign of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), the Xuanwu Palace was built on it to fete Emperor Zhenwu and suppress the deity of fire. In the first year (1573) of the Wanli reign of the Ming Dynasty, it underwent a large-scale expansion and became three-storeyed pavilion, with corridors, walls, bells and huge rocks, stoves and other auxiliary buildings and facilities around it. After hundreds of years, only the Pavilion of Genuine Prowess still stands intact.

The Pavilion of Genuine Prowess is a unique wooden building, with a height of 13.2 meters, a width of 13.8 meters and a depth of 11.2 meters. The whole pavilion was composed of about three thousand petrous wooden components of different sizes. These components are in series, and set into each other to achieve mutual support. They harmonically constitute an elegant and steady integral.

Because there is no wall between the bottom of the building and the yard, it looks very open and broad. Eight of the twenty erect huge columns rise upward to the attic; they are the main support of the full load of the three-storeyed pavilion. Girders connect the columns; there are four cup-shaped arches on each column and four prism-shaped stakes on top of them. There are four braces for the second floor, which hold the floor slabs, girders, assistant columns and tiles of the upper floors. The socles that hang 3 centimeters from the ground are the most outstanding and ingenious part of the pavilion. It is constructed by using eighteen girders to traverse the eave columns in two layers on the hanging columns, and form two groups of rigorous lever-like dougong (wooden square blocks inserted between the top of a column and a crossbeam), with the heads of the dougong holding the wide eaves outside, and the tails of the dougong holding the hanging columns inside. Keeping a balance, this lever-like unique Lever Structure is unusual in architecture. Tenons instead of iron nails are used during the construction. After four hundred years, the Pavilion of Genuine Prowess, a masterpiece of ancient Chinese architecture, still stands there imposingly.

(Source: chinaculture.org)