Nine Dragon Wall

Tucked along a street in Datong's old town stands the oldest and largest glazed dragon screen in China. The Nine Dragon Wall was built in 1392 as the spirit screen for the mansion of Zhu Gui, Prince of Dai and the thirteenth son of the Ming founder Hongwu. The mansion is long gone, but the screen that once shielded its gate from prying eyes, and from wandering spirits, has survived for more than six centuries.

The numbers are part of the appeal. The wall runs 45.5 metres long, stands 8 metres high and is 2 metres thick, built from 426 specially fired glazed ceramic tiles in yellow, green, blue, purple and ochre. Nine dragons coil across its face above a band of rolling waves, each one caught mid-motion among clouds and spray. It is markedly larger than the better-known nine-dragon walls in Beijing's Forbidden City and Beihai Park, both of which came later. A long reflecting pool in front was designed so the dragons appear to ripple and swim when the water is still.

A visit is short, twenty to thirty minutes, which makes the wall an easy stop while exploring the old town on foot. It sits close to the Huayan Temple and the rebuilt city wall, so most travellers fold all three into a single walking afternoon. Come early or late in the day if you want the reflecting pool clear of crowds for a photograph.

Reading the wall

Spend a few minutes and the composition resolves into a deliberate hierarchy. The central dragon, picked out in imperial yellow, faces forward in the place of honour, flanked by pairs that turn and twist toward it through stylised clouds and waves. Between and below the dragons, the glazed band of water and rock is carved with fish, frogs and other small creatures, so the whole screen reads as a single churning sea. The colours come from metal oxides fired into the glaze: copper for green, cobalt for blue, iron for the ochres and yellows.

When to visit and how it fits a day

The wall sits in the heart of the restored old town, a short walk from the Huayan and Shanhua temples and the city wall, so it works best as one stop on a half-day of walking rather than a destination on its own. Mornings and the hour before closing are quietest. The site is compact and largely shaded by the screen itself, which makes it a comfortable pause even in summer heat, and the small admission fee keeps it uncrowded compared with the bigger sights outside town.

How it compares

China has three celebrated nine-dragon walls, and Datong's is the senior of them by a wide margin. The screen in Beijing's Forbidden City and the one in Beihai Park were both built later and are smaller, which makes the Datong wall the benchmark against which the others are measured. Glazed spirit screens like this were a privilege of the highest nobility, meant to block direct sightlines into a gateway and to turn away malevolent forces, which always travel in straight lines in Chinese folk belief. Seen in that light, the wall is not just decoration but a working piece of the old residence's design. If you can, return after dark in the warmer months, when the screen and the surrounding old-town lanes are gently lit and far quieter than during the day.