Songyue Pagoda's first article credits its brick and clay mortar construction with outlasting the wooden temples built around it in the sixth century; what that same construction had to survive afterward was fifteen centuries of regional earthquakes, a test brick alone does not guarantee passing. A 2020 structural engineering study in E3S Web of Conferences modeled the pagoda's seismic behavior directly, treating its survival as a question to test rather than assume from the fact that it is still standing.
The model's central finding was that the pagoda's stiffness is distributed evenly along its height, a property its twelve sided, steadily tapering profile produces almost automatically. A structure with no sharp corners and a narrowing cross section gives an earthquake's shaking no single weak joint to concentrate on, the main reason the study credits for its seismic performance holding up under analysis and not only against centuries of survival. The modeling flagged one weakness, a stretch where the taper briefly stops changing section, the point most likely to develop a tension crack under strong shaking.
That mixed finding, broadly sound but carrying one mapped vulnerability, is closer to how engineers actually read the pagoda than the popular version, which credits its survival to age and brick alone. Historical records already noted regional earthquakes that damaged the pagoda only lightly, treated by the study as evidence to model rather than proof needing no explanation. A shape chosen in 523 to approximate an Indian stupa's round plan within a tradition built around straight edges turned out, under seismic analysis, to also be genuinely resistant rather than merely a lucky survivor.