There's alot missed out from the East:
the Potala Palace in Lhasa is 656 ft tall. It comprises a 384 ft high 1000 room palace on a massive 272 ft base of stone and brick dug into a hollowed hillside. Its 1180 ft long and was rebuilt in 1645
There is also a 510ft high pagoda in Chanzhou, the fabled Tianning Pagoda destroyed 5x in the last 1,350 years and rebuilt each time - once again completed last year. Nanjing also had one of 500 ft, now destroyed:
smaller pyramids disguised:
the worlds largest pyramid is also rumoured to be in Qin Lin county in a 'forbidden zone' of China, estimated at nearly 1000ft high and made of impounded earth and clay, and holding vast tombs (note the Terracotta Army tomb, that will take 80 years excavate is only one of 900 still remaining). The Chinese govt have long denied the existence of 100 or so pyramids though the increasing tourism to the Xian tombs area is threatening the secrecy with tourists climbing the 25-100m pyramids for themselves. The govt has planted trees on them to disguise them too. After outright denying their existence, the govt finally admitted to the existence to New Zealand author Bruce Caithie of some 'trapezoid tombs', however the fabled white pyramid has only ever been seen by a few Westerners this century. Heres an excerpt from a book:
satellite photos:
"I was searching for a pyramid which was said to have been, once, many millennia ago, multicolored, and to now be a dusty white. This was a pyramid which, legend has it, rises to the astonishing height of 1,000 feet - four-fifths the elevation of the Empire State Building. Not only was this extraordinary structure said to be the largest pyramid in the world (the Giant Pyramid of Egypt, by comparison, rises a mere 450 feet); but, in the valleys surrounding it, there were said to be dozens of other pyramids, some rising to an elevation almost as great.
Until recently, Chinese officials have rebuffed all questions about these pyramids and all requests to view them. And yet, over this century, a certain mythology has grown up around them. An American trader, stumbling upon these amazing structures in 1912, asked his Buddhist monk-guide about them. He was told that 5,000-year-old monastic documents not only contained informa-tion about these pyramids, but said the pyramids were extremely old when these records were made.
The trader, Fred Meyer Schroder, observed several smaller pyramids in the distance. He wrote in his travel diary that his first sight of the giant pyramid, along with its smaller cousins, rendered him almost speechless. "It was even more uncanny than if we had found it in the wilderness," he wrote. "But those [ pyra-mids) were to some extent exposed to the eyes of the world—but still totally unknown in the western world."
In the Far East in the spring of 1945, though Japanese troops were still fighting in China, the U.S. Army and its allies were well on their way to pushing the Japanese off the mainland. One day, U.S. Air Force Pilot James Gaussman was returning to Assam, in India, after having flown the ‘Burma Hump’-ferried supplies to Chungking, China, from India-when engine trouble forced him to descend temporarily to a low altitude over China. As he later wrote:
"I flew around a mountain and then we came to a valley. Directly below us was a gigantic white pyramid. It looked as if it were from a fairy tale. The pyramid was draped in shimmering white. It could have been metal, or some other form of stone. It was white on all sides. What was most curious about it was its capstone: a large piece of precious gem-like material. I was deeply moved by the colossal size of the thing."
When Gaussman arrived back in Assam, combat duties pushed the sighting from his mind. Photographs he had taken of the giant pyramid would not be published for another 45 years. Till then, even his report would be buried in the Secret Service files of the U.S. military
Two years later, in 1947, another U.S. aviator, Maurice Sheahan—this time flying over Shaanxi Province, not far from Xian-- caught sight of a giant pyramid in the misty landscape below and rapidly snapped pictures. This time, several U.S. newspapers, in-cluding the New York Times for March 28, 1947, published ac-counts of the airman’s sighting. But Chinese archaeologists con-tinued to deny the existence of such a structure, even though Sheahan’s photographs suggested it was higher than any pyramid in Egypt. "
could this be it?
