The One Pillar Pagoda is located near the Ho Chi Minh City Mausoleum and is considered one of the most famous in Vietnam. It is also called the Temple of Distant Salvation and the Tower of the Lotus Flower.
This Buddhist shrine is very ancient, built in 1049, during the reign of Ly Thai Tong. The emperor, who had no heirs, dreamed of the goddess of mercy sitting on a lotus flower. She handed him a newborn son. Soon after, Li married and had a son. The grateful ruler built a pagoda and embodied in it the motifs of his dream. In the middle of the lotus pond, he built a stone pillar four metres high. On this pillar, more than a metre in diameter, he erected a wooden pagoda shaped like a lotus flower. In Buddhism, this flower symbolises enlightenment.
During the Li Dynasty, the temple was considered the main temple in the city, it held annual Buddhist festivals. It was repeatedly restored and improved. At the beginning of the XII century, the Sacred Tower and bridges were built. But after the Chiang dynasty came to the throne, the pagoda lost the status of the main temple. In 1954, the French colonising army destroyed the beautiful structure during the retreat.
The national relic was later restored to its original form. It is now no longer a temple complex, but simply a small pagoda standing in the centre of a pond. It contains a statue of the goddess of mercy on a small altar.
The pagoda can be accessed by a bridge - a ladder. But the small size of the pagoda allows only a glimpse into it. Near the pagoda next to the pond grows a low tree. It is sacred, presented to Ho Chi Minh by Indian Buddhists in 1958. Not only tourists come to the pagoda. Locals believe that near it one should pray for the birth of children.
Copies of this unusual pagoda have been built in a district of Ho Chi Minh City and in Moscow in the Russian-Vietnamese cultural and business centre.
