Datong Nine-Dragon Wall: A Six-Hundred-Year Dragon Shadow of a Ming Prince’s Mansion

📍 Address: Heyang Street, Datong City, Shanxi Province Standing before the gate of the Prince Dai Mansion in Datong, nine giant dragons suddenly break through the mottled glazed tiles. This dragon screen, built 350 years earlier than the Nine-Dragon Wall in Beihai Park, Beijing, is not an ordinary screen wall but the gate tower of the fiefdom of Zhu Gui, the thirteenth son of Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang. While tourists flock to the Yingxian Wooden Pagoda and Yungang Grottoes, only this dragon shadow still guards the princely dignity from the Hongwu era. Counting the glazed tiles on the wall, 426 colorful glazes shimmer in the clear northern sky in shades of blue, green, gold, and purple. The 45.5-meter-long dragon wall stretches like a screen, over eight meters high, with mythical beasts such as qilin and running horses chasing clouds at the waist of the Sumeru pedestal. The most extraordinary feature is the reflection pool—if you look down at the pool at dawn or dusk, you can see the glazed cloud dragons swimming in the water, as the ancients cleverly embedded a glazed mirror surface into the wall! The dragon eyes, worn by time, still gaze upon the rise and fall of the Prince Dai Mansion over three centuries. When Li Zicheng burned down the mansion, only this dragon wall survived the flames, becoming a rare architectural gem of the Ming feudal system. Only now do we realize that these nine dragons guard not only the former prince’s mansion but also the most vigorous ancient dragon spirit among the three existing Nine-Dragon Walls in China. 📸 Special note: On sunny afternoons, the glaze reflects golden light (it is backlit in the morning)! Or after the lights are turned on at night!