Young People's Lives Are Steeped in Wang Culture

Marinated to perfection. Recently, players of Honor of Kings have been pretty busy. Launch the game, and the tower-defense voice line has become "Protect our Yingxian Wooden Pagoda." Log out, and they're in the comment section asking: Where is the Yingxian Wooden Pagoda? How old is it? Why this one? A wooden pagoda that has stood in Shanxi for 970 years has, in this way, been "fished out" of the canyon by a group of young people. And leading the charge is a hero who can't even speak. No one can understand Dunshan's voice lines. Among the more than one hundred heroes in the canyon, his are the only pure sound effects, like a radio that's off its tuning. Whether you understand them doesn't matter, since he never relies on his mouth anyway. When a teammate is about to fall, he raises his iron arm; when a tower is about to collapse, he crawls right inside and repairs it bit by bit. In the entire game, only he can repair towers. Other heroes defend towers by standing in front of them and taking hits; Dunshan defends towers by repairing them as if they were his own life. Honor of Kings' limited-edition skin for its 2026 anniversary went to Dunshan, called "A Thousand Years in One Tower." It was created in collaboration with the Shanxi Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism and the Shuozhou Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism, under the academic guidance of the Shanxi Research Institute for the Protection of Ancient Architecture and Painted Sculptures and Murals. By the way, it's free. The skin also hides a lot of details: the shield face is the pagoda's structure, and when you activate the shield you can hear the sound of wooden mechanisms rolling. Returning to base shows bracket-arm warriors and a little lion repairing the tower together. There is also a smaller easter egg: the effects include a flock of swallows. In reality, the Yingxian Wooden Pagoda welcomes these birds every spring and summer, which pick out insects boring into the wooden joints to eat. They're like a group of unpaid tower guardians, except their shifts are a bit short. The first reaction from players, remarkably uniform, was: "It's actually the Yingxian Wooden Pagoda." "First time I've heard there's a pagoda like this." A name that is 970 years old was, for the vast majority of these young people, the first time they had ever heard it. And there really is another group of tower guardians on the pagoda. They aren't game NPCs; they need to climb the tower regularly to monitor it, recording the tilt data of the North Leaning Pillar, guarding against fire, moisture, and insects, circling the same wooden tower year after year. This year, Honor of Kings teamed up with Tencent Charity to launch the "Protect the Yingxian Wooden Pagoda" charity campaign, supporting the daily maintenance of the Yingxian Wooden Pagoda. Through the Tencent Foundation, charitable funds are donated to support daily maintenance and to ensure the frontline guardians have what they need for their work. The tower in the game can be repaired even when its health bar is empty; the real tower has no health bar and no respawn, and relies entirely on people watching it year after year. The defense tower and the Yingxian Wooden Pagoda have echoed each other across dimensions and across time. The mutual journey of heroes and players "A Thousand Years in One Tower