Six heads, one tower

The People Behind the Chinese Tower

Buildings have dates; stories have faces. These six men imagined, built, shaped, nearly demolished and finally rebuilt Munich's Chinese Tower and its park. Know them, and you can read the English Garden like a book.

Karl Theodor (1724-1799): the Elector who decreed the park

Karl Theodor, Elector of the Palatinate and from 1777 of Bavaria as well, was never loved by the people of Munich. Yet it was he who gave the city its greatest treasure: in 1789 he decreed that the hunting grounds outside the gates be turned into a public garden, a park for all classes rather than a court garden for the few, a near-revolutionary idea in the Europe of his day. That the new park immediately received a pleasure building with a tavern, the Chinese Tower, fitted the programme: the park was meant to be used, not admired from afar.

Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753-1814): the organiser

American-born Benjamin Thompson, ennobled as Count Rumford, was a physicist, social reformer and administrator in Bavarian service, and the driving force behind the English Garden. He oversaw the young park and thought of it as social policy: employment, provision, recreation. On 6 July 1794 he invited the staff of his military workhouse to a party in the park, an early echo of what would later become the Kocherlball. On the side he invented the Rumford stove and Rumford soup.

Joseph Frey: the man with the plan

The books know less about military architect Joseph Frey than about his work, and his work everyone knows: in 1789 Frey designed the Chinese Tower, a wooden pagoda modelled on the roughly 50-metre Great Pagoda at Kew in London, scaled to Munich. Five storeys, 25 metres, curved shingle roofs: chinoiserie for the people's park.

Johann Baptist Lechner: the builder

Paper is patient; timber is not. Johann Baptist Lechner executed Frey's design in 1789/90, raising a pagoda that tapers from 19 metres across at the base to six at the top, a demanding piece of carpentry. His tower stood for some 150 years, until war, not age, brought it down in 1944. The 1952 reconstruction followed his forms so faithfully that Lechner's tower still defines the English Garden today.

Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell (1750-1823): the man who nearly demolished it

Perhaps the best twist in the tower's story: the man who gave the English Garden its present shape wanted the tower gone. Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell, in charge of the park from 1804, created the sweeping meadows and winding paths we know today. Exotic follies like a Chinese pagoda had no place in his vision of a pure landscape, and in his 1807 plan he proposed removing the tower. He failed; Munich was too attached to it. It remained his only defeat, and the city may be grateful for it to this day.

Franz Zell: the rebuilder

When the tower burnt out in July 1944, it could have been written off; Munich in 1945 had other worries than a wooden pagoda. That things turned out differently is owed to architect Franz Zell and the citizens who carried the reconstruction. In 1951/52 the tower was rebuilt true to the original, in timber, and reopened on 6 September 1952. Sit under the shingle roofs today and you sit under Zell's craftsmanship and Lechner's idea at once.

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The full building history is on our history page, the living traditions on the traditions page.