Pagodas can be divided into battle pagodas, sentry pagodas, border pagodas, Feng Shui pagodas and Guanzhai pagodas. There are stone towers and rammed earth towers.
For example, build a stone tower: after selecting the foundation, first dig the foundation deep and fill it with big stones, 3 feet thick on each side. Using local materials, gravel and flaky are alternately stacked to form "transverse compression ribs and flat compression veins". The upper and lower stones are staggered, and the upper and lower stones are filled with small stone wedges, yellow mud is used as adhesive, and the upper and lower stones are collected and laid in layers, and the cross bars in the sandwich wall are used for wall reinforcement. This wall is wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, and the harvest period is tapered. Each floor is ten feet high. Separated by beams. The chessboard has been laid. There are wooden ladders up and down the stairs. The bottom of the watchtower is completely closed. You can use the wooden ladder to go up and down outside and take it to the second floor.
There is a small door on the second floor to get in and out. There are four vertical windows on the second floor, which are large inside and small outside, commonly known as "Luohan window". It is used for ventilation, lookout and archery. At the top of the tower, there are four arrows and several stones. In an emergency, you can throw stones under the watchtower to attack the enemy. Some watchtowers are embedded with ceramic water pipes, and the hidden water flows to the watchtower through the water inlet and outlet. In the case of foreign invasion, an overall protection system centered on the high tower is formed. All families need to do is close the door and fight the enemy with their roofs. You can also use hidden passages and gates to concentrate on the central watchtower. This is obviously a reliable defense system without firearms during the ancient Cold War.
If the evolution of Qiang architecture in the Millennium is due to the natural evolution of the world, it is a high-intensity test of the living fossils of the Millennium architecture.
On the roads in Mao Wen, people can clearly see a large number of towering stone towers collapsed or damaged.
Luobu Village 1970-meter-high yellow rammed earth building and Bua yellow mud watchtower are the only two yellow mud buildings in Qiang area and the tallest rammed earth building in the world. When the earthquake happened, witnesses said that only a yellow mushroom cloud rose above 0, and hundreds of yellow watchtowers collapsed.
Many of these watchtowers or watchtowers have a history of hundreds of years, and they are all located in the Longmenshan fault active area where earthquakes occur frequently. They have survived so far, it should be said that they have withstood the test.