The pagoda standing in Xi'an today is not the building first raised in 652 CE, and its construction reveals more engineering care than its plain brick exterior suggests. The original structure was built around a core of rammed earth faced with stone, a Tang dynasty technique suited to a smaller building but not to lasting centuries at height. When Empress Wu Zetian ordered it rebuilt taller in 704 CE, the reconstruction used layered fired brick rather than rammed earth throughout, the bricks laid without mortar in the core, a method that let the structure flex slightly during an earthquake instead of cracking as a single rigid mass, which is part of why the pagoda has survived repeated seismic activity in a historically active region.
The finished form follows Tang architectural convention closely: a square base, walls that taper gradually as the structure rises, and eaves at each story that curve upward at their corners rather than running flat, a silhouette instantly recognizable across East Asian Buddhist architecture of the period though executed here at unusual scale. Inside, the pagoda was built to be climbed rather than merely viewed, with a staircase winding up through its seven stories to platforms that open onto the city below at each level, a design that treated the building as a functioning library tower for Xuanzang's texts rather than a solid monument.
That combination, a religious reliquary engineered like a functional building, is part of why UNESCO inscribed the pagoda in 2014 as one stop on the Silk Roads: the Routes Network of Chang'an Tianshan Corridor, a listing that reads the building as physical evidence of the trade and pilgrimage routes it once helped anchor rather than as an isolated monument.