Chinese Lantern Festival’s showpiece a pagoda built of porcelain in Riverfront Park

How to top a 196-foot dragon?

Try 70,000 porcelain cups, plates and spoons, painstakingly placed by hand to create a towering pagoda on the edge of Riverfront Park.

Organizers of the second annual Washington State Chinese Lantern Festival wanted a different showpiece for the event, which started Friday.

The pagoda on the eastern edge of Riverfront Park is made of nine porcelain towers of the blue-and-white porcelain. The towers are topped with multicolored spires, and statues of Buddha sit sentinel around the base.

The porcelain all comes from the town of Jingdezhen in China’s Jiangxi province, which is famous for its porcelain, said show manager Jessie Li of Tianyu Arts and Culture. Tianyu is the Sichuan, China-based company presenting the festival.

“Chinese people love using this kind of thing for their daily use,” Li said of the porcelain.

Tianyu brought in 21 people to create the lanterns – and the pagoda – from scratch. Three of them worked eight hours a day for a month to create the pagoda, using a crane to build the towering spires. They hand-tied all the pieces together, then wired them to a metal frame.

Special care had to be taken to keep the porcelain from being damaged.

In China a pagoda is usually part of a temple, Li said.

The pagoda in Riverfront Park is patterned after the Manfeilong Pagoda, which has become a tourist attraction in Xishuangbanna in China’s Yunnan province. Also known as the White Pagoda and Bamboo Shoot Pagoda, it was built in 1024 and is dedicated to Hinayana Buddhism.

While massive, the pagoda is also delicate. Security guards patrol the area, and Li said she’s hopeful the weather will not get bad enough to damage it.

“We just anticipate that everything will be good,” she said.