Chairman
"As the successor to Koguryo, Palhae played a major role in the historical development of our country in the period from the late 7th century to the early 10th century."
Sanggyong stone lantern is a kind of lantern made of stone to put a fire inside. It is situated in the second temple site of Palhae. The feudal rulers used this lantern in propagating Buddhism.
It is situated in the second temple site of the Walled City of Sanggyong, the relic of the Walled Capital of Palhae, in Bohaizhen, Ningan City, Heilongjiang Province, China.
This stone lantern is one of the architectural structures of Palhae that remains intact on the ground. It is about 6m high now, but its original height was 6.3m. So this is one of the oldest and largest stone lanterns in the Korean history.
It is excellent in structure as it was designed and built with structural safety.
Especially its ground was safely designed and constructed.
In general, the ground must be designed and built strong enough to support the weight of the structure. It must endure groundwater and load.
Sanggyong stone lantern was designed and constructed to satisfy these conditions. That's why it has been standing as its original state without any transformation for over a thousand year since it was built. The lantern was repaired in October, 1966, but they only put the top, which had been out of upright, to its original place.
The fact that it has remained without any significant transformation indicates that Palhae people designed its ground very solid in order to maximize its stability when they were building it.
All the structural elements of this lantern were also designed and constructed safely to withstand any natural influence.
Its pillars, subgrade, finial and beam circles are round, while the other elements are octagonal.
Each side of the support and fire box fits with an extreme and mean ratio and integer ratio. The door frame and all the holes for the light to come through are square-shaped. All the elements and their layout are also agreed with geometric calculation by a proportional analysis. This shows that the design of the lantern was well evaluated for safety.
It is well known for the design that it is reduced gradually in turn up to the top. All parts including beam circles on the top of the lantern were built in this way. There are four beam circles on the top of the stone lantern. These four beam circles were designed and constructed to become narrow toward the top by the same width respectively. Thus, the sum of the widths of the first beam circle and the fourth one from the bottom is equal to the sum of the widths of the second and third one.
Its platform and pillar support the weight of the upper part of the lantern because it was built in the way to reduce gradually in turn up to the top.
Another architectural excellence of this lantern is also revealed in its formative artistry.
It consists of four parts: a pedestal, a pillar, a fire box, and a top of the lantern, but it was designed and constructed in a formative and artistic way, with a well-balanced, heavy and coveted lower part and a good open upper part. The main parts of the lantern including the pedestal and the fire box are octagonal. There is a floor stone at the bottom, whose surface was low. There is a pedestal with a base, middle and top stone above the floor stone. Each side of the middle stone has a large Omokyi(profile of lotus flower), which makes the pedestal look very soft.
The pillar stone looks strong, heavy and stable because of a massive and plump form. Its surface is round and in diameter the low is wider than the top, while the middle is wider than the low. About two-fifths of the height of the pillar is the plumpest point, so it looks very stable formatively.
Turning around the bottom of the pillar, Pokryons(reversed lotus flower) are decorated, while the upper part has threefold Angryons(lotus flower as it is), which makes it look heavy and grave.
On the top of the pillar stone is an octagonal fire box, which looks like an intact octagonal pavilion. There is an octagonal big stone (the base of the pavilion) under the fire box. Each corner of the octagonal big stone has grooves, which seemed to be used as the holes for the balusters. There used to be balusters around the big stone. The lower and upper part of the big stone under the fire box has protruding edges.
On 8 sides of the stone (the body of the pavilion) has 8 holes for the fire-light to come through. These holes are shaped like long rectangles up and down. Eight corners of the stone were studded with pillars.
The pillar is supported by a corner stone, and a lintel follows between the pillars. Tugong(a kind of pillar-support structure) was engraved on the pillar. A capital, an ancon and the other aspects were very vivid.
The fire box is covered with an octagonal roof, which is a stone tile roof. The roof vividly depicted the common rafters, the eaves scantlings, the convex tiles, antefix, the hip and even the ridge tiles on the end of the hip, which highlighted the delicate formative beauty.
There was a fire spot in the fire box and a head of the lantern was placed on the top of the stone lantern. The top of the lantern head was like a flagpole built in front of a big temple. A few years ago, there remained such elements as the under support, the finial, the beam circles, and ornament like the pictures of water and smoke, beam cover. There is a hole in the top of the beam cover.
Thus, Sanggyong stone lantern was designed and built in a way that emphasized the formative artistry by making it a basic octagonal plane surface, and making it work out in various figures such as bulging pillars and octagonal pavilions.
Another superiority of the Sanggyong stone lantern lies in the stones used to build it and their processing technology.
The stone was basalt, which was difficult to process because of its high strength and high surface density, but the stone lantern was well processed.
It shows that Palhae people had a high stone-processing technique: each side of the middle support stone with an Omokyi(profile of lotus flower), the lower part of the pillar with engraved lotus, the fire box which was made like a pavilion and the roof with various tiles. And each stone of the lantern could be reassembled after dismantling it.
The Sanggyong stone lantern, designed and built in an excellent architectural and formative way, clearly shows the superiority of Palhae architecture that had been inherited from Koguryo.
