Talk:Great Pagoda, Kew Gardens

For later

 * Porcelain Tower of Nanjing
 * *

Pillar restoration: not a color balance issue!
I was a little thrown off when I saw photos of red pillars on the Great Pagoda instead of the white we have in the article photo. After some futile fudging in GIMP, I checked the gallery and it clicked: the pillars and the ground floor roof used to be red (just like the Beijing and Guangzhou stuff), but the restoration turned them white.

I hope this comment saves someone as clueless as I am from wasting 10 minutes. It would also be useful to hunt down how Historic Royal Palaces decided that white is the original color and who turned the pillars red to begin with. -- Artoria2e5 🌉 15:57, 8 August 2023 (UTC)


 * - I hope the time wasn’t entirely wasted, in that you spent 10 minutes thinking about a fascinating building - and am pleased the article sparked the interest. In answer to the specific question, I simply don’t know. But the restoration was lengthy, expensive and scholarly, so I think it very likely that HRP and Kew had evidence for the original colouring. The Victorians certainly associated red with China (see Biddulph Grange) so perhaps they repainted them red in the 19th century. I’ll have a look to see what the sources I have say. KJP1 (talk) 16:26, 8 August 2023 (UTC)