[3][4] The Porcelain Tower of Nanjing, originally called the Great Bao'en Temple, was designed during the reign of the Yongle Emperor (r. 1402–1424); its construction began in the early 15th century.

The 1843 book, The Closing Events of the Campaign in China by Granville Gower Loch, contains a detailed description of the tower as it existed in the early 1840s.

In 1856, the Taiping razed the tower to the ground either in order to prevent a hostile faction from using it to observe and shell the city[8] or from superstitious fear of its geomantic properties.

When it was built, the tower was one of the largest buildings in China, rising up to a height of 79 metres (259 ft) with nine stories and a staircase in the middle of the pagoda, which spiraled upwards for 184 steps.

Glazes and stoneware were worked into the porcelain and created a mixture of green, yellow, brown and white designs on the sides of the tower, including animals, flowers and landscapes.