Showing posts with label Travel to China. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Travel to China. Show all posts
Monday, April 14, 2014
Visit Beijing's Forbidden City Before It Starts Limiting Visitors
Soon, China will begin limiting how many tourists can visit the Forbidden City in Beijing.
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
Step Into A Real-World Watercolor Painting In Hangzhou, Home To China’s Most Picturesque Landscapes
Natural and Cultural Wonders of the West Lake, Grand Canal, XiXi Wetlands and Lingying Temple among Top Tourist Destinations in China
Hangzhou, China: Marco Polo fell in love with it. Poets and painters captured its beauty. Even ancient emperors were awestruck when they visited Hangzhou.
Like San Francisco, Hangzhou is a city by the bay. Like New York, it has world-class museums and cultural activity beating around a heart of green space. Like Venice, its houses are lapped by the gentle currents of a canal.
And like their historical predecessors, modern-day explorers marvel at the rivers, lakes, mountains, and monuments of Hangzhou; a thriving port and economic giant an hour south of Shanghai, but worlds away from anything else in China, that enjoys a reputation as the country’s happiest city.
In an area where man-made creations mesh with the best of nature, Hangzhou’s West Lake remains the canvass on which the city’s beauty is portrayed. As UNESCO explained when designating West Lake a World Heritage Site in 2011, “the key components of West Lake still allow it to inspire people to ‘project feelings onto the landscape.”
The West Lake - A UNESCO World Heritage Site
The West Lake is so photogenic, locals believe a dazzling pearl fell from heaven and transformed itself into the serene body of water, surrounded by rolling hills replete with tea houses, temples, monasteries, and museums. A bevy of bridges, causeways, and willow-shrouded walkways makes visitors forget the nearby city is the fourth largest in China.
By boat or bike is the best way to experience the West Lake, where the array of statues, pagodas, and monuments would take weeks to explore. On the short list of must-see attractions are the Mausoleum of General Yue Fei, Six Harmonies Pagoda, Two Peaks Embracing the Sky, Temple of Soul’s retreat, Peak Flown from Afar, and Solitary Hill.
In the nearby Hangzhou Botanical Gardens, more than 1,000 yellow wintersweets blossomed during the Laba Festival in January.
The Grand Canal
There are two wonders in China, one is the Great Wall, and the other is the Grand Canal. The Grand Canal lives up to its name in more ways than one: the man-made waterway stretches 1200 miles from Hangzhou to Beijing and has stood the test of time for more than 2,000 years. An engineering marvel comparable to the Great Wall of China, the Grand Canal has sightseeing boats that provide perspectives of life in South China river towns. With its array of venerable waterside dwellings and stone bridges, it has the Venetian flavor that Marco Polo favored.
Lingyin Temple
Not far from West Lake is Lingyin Temple also known as Temple of Soul's Retreat (literal translated name), is the most celebrated place of interest around West Lake and one of the top ten Buddhist temples of China. Founded in the year 368, it once housed more than 3,000 monks.
With its network of cliffs and grottoes and its pastoral surroundings in the Wulin Mountains, the temple affords visitors both a religious and spiritual experience. The oldest and most significant statue on the site, the 800-year-old Skanda Buddha, guards the rear entrance, while the front is dominated by an enormous sculpture called “the Laughing Buddha.” Inside, in the Grand Hall of the Great Sage, is the largest wooden Buddhist statue in China.
Xixi National Wetland Park
Xixi National Wetland Park is the only national wetland park in China, located at the west part of Hangzhou. The park is densely crisscrossed with six main watercourses, among which scatter various ponds, lakes and swamps. The wetland has a history and cultural heritage of more than 1,800 years, and is the original site of Chinese South Opera. It is home to traditional Dragon Boat races and vivid life of a water village, including silkworm feeding and silk production.
About Hangzhou
Hangzhou is one of the six oldest capitals in China and an integral part of the world’s sixth largest economic center – the Yangtze River Delta. Offering 5,000 years of rich culture, it was established as an important city in Chinese civilization by 221 BC. When Marco Polo visited 800 years ago, he declared it “the finest and most splendid city in the world.”
The city is located on West Lake, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Grand Canal, the world’s oldest and longest man-made canal, begins at Hangzhou and ends at Beijing and incorporates 132 heritage sites (seven of which are in Hangzhou). The city has a well-known heritage in the production of fine porcelain, silk and tea, and tourists may visit museums dedicated to each and learn how these skills have impacted civilization generally.
Hangzhou is at the center of stunning natural landscape with the West Lake encompassed on three sides by hills. The lake, a fusion of culture and nature, has inspired famous poets, scholars and artists since the 9th century. Ten scenic sites have been given poetic names such as Autumn Moon, Twin Peaks Piercing the Clouds, etc. There are two causeways and three islands with picturesque pagodas, pavilions, lush gardens and historic temples. Hangzhou is the political, historical and cultural center of Zhejiang Province on the southeast coast of China, only 45 minutes from Shanghai on the bullet train. To facilitate connectivity within the city, use of bicycles is encouraged as a means of transportation and may be rented by the hour.
Saturday, February 1, 2014
Travelore Tips: 7 Recommended Things To Do In Hong Kong
Hong Kong is the world's most vertical city, with two hundred and ninety-three buildings higher than five hundred feet -- sixty more than second-place New York City. Here are our tips on getting the most out of this remarkable destination.
Bask in A Symphony of Lights
A traditional Chinese junk sets sail amid Hong Kong's modern skyscrapers during A Symphony of Lights.
Every night Hong Kong's skyline, on both sides of Victoria Harbor, comes alive in a spectacular musical laser light show that the Guinness Book of World Records has proclaimed the world's largest permanent light and sound show.
WATCH:The skyline comes to life!
Jumbo + Floating + Hong Kong
Since 1976 one of Hong Kong's top attractions has been Jumbo Kingdom, a floating restaurant. Wait, floating? Yes floating, as in a boat moored in the middle of Aberdeen Harbor. It's so impressive that a Queen (as in Elizabeth II), a Duke (as in John Wayne), a Maverick (as in Tom Cruise) and over thirty million other people have all felt the need to see it.
Get Spiritual with a REALLY Big Buddha
We could certainly see why he is commonly called Big Buddha. He is really, really big, but since Buddhas come sitting, standing or reclining, it is difficult to judge just which one is the largest, still The Tian Tan Buddha is one of the biggest in the world. He stands, oops, sits, one hundred and twelve feet high, and weighs in at a slender 280 tons of bronze.
Catch a Ding Ding
Best seat in the house: We always tried to snag the upper deck front window!
The trolleys of Hong Kong Island are affectionately known as "ding dings" for the bells they seem to be constantly ringing. A whole fleet of double decker street cars rolls endlessly back and forth along the north shore, which is the most bustling part of the city. Because the fare for these wonderful old trolleys is but a mere pittance, we jumped on and off several times, whenever something caught our eye.
Climb to the Top of Victoria Peak
By all accounts, the best place to gaze upon all the skyscrapers is from the top of Victoria Peak. At the top we briefly checked out the Peak Tower and Peak Galleria, before taking a little stroll along the Peak Circle Walk. We think that this trail offered the best views of the incredible cityscape below.
Ride the Star Ferry
For a just over two Hong Kong dollars -- that's pocket change, about thirty cents U.S. -- we climbed aboard the vintage 1965 Silver Star and enjoyed one of the most spectacular urban views on the planet. No wonder the line's dozen classic old boats carry up to twenty-six million passengers each year.
View the Wares of Tonic Food and Dried Seafood Streets
Des Voeux Road is known as Dried Seafood Street. We were amazed by the offerings, truly works of art, every one. Nearby Tonic Food Street is famous for ancient Chinese medicines, traditional herbal remedies, and tonic foods such as ginseng, deer fetus and bird's nest. With life expectancy in Hong Kong among the highest in the world, who are we to argue?
Contributed by David and Veronica, GypsyNester.com
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
China Is Transforming Tibet's Holiest Area Into A Tourist District
China is transforming the ancient part of Tibet's capital into a tourist district according to a visiting native of the area, Amy Li of the South China Morning Post reports.
The construction project near the Jokhang temple — the most sacred and important temple in Tibet — reportedly involves building a 150,000 square meter shopping center and an underground parking lot in the heart of the ancient city.
Li reports that the government plans to evict vendors and residents in the area so that their houses and shops could be used to attract new businesses including restaurants, bars, and art galleries.
“Lhasa is being destroyed by excessive commercial development,” Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser, who lives in Beijing but grew up in the capital, wrote in a letter after visiting the area. “Please save Lhasa.”
Li notes that the post received thousands of comments and shares on the social network Weibo before Chinese censors took it down.
“Lhasa doesn’t exist for only tourists,” Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser, who lives in Beijing but grew up in the capital, told SCMP. “There are real people who live here and it’s also a religious place."
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Jokhang Square
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Jokhang, built around 642 AD, is Tibet's first Buddhist temple and the ultimate pilgrimage destination for Tibetan pilgrims.
The monastery is an extension of The Potala Palace, which is the winter palace of the Dalai Lama. Both are UNESCO heritage sites and located near Tibet's government.
From UNESCO:
The Historic Ensemble of the Potala Palace, Jokhang Temple and Norbulingka embody the administrative, religious and symbolic functions of the Tibetan theocratic government through their location, layout and architecture.
Several "modernized" areas of China — including another UNESCO heritage site — have been "criticized for being overly commercialized and having lost its soul after many original residents moved out," according to Li.
The construction sign below, translated by Business Insider, says that the site is under construction so that the area can become an "international tourist attraction."
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Shanghai: 5 Freebies From Bund To Art Districts
Contributed by Joe McDonald, AP.
In this May 8, 2013 photo, tourists stroll on the the Bund, one of the most famous tourist destinations, in Shanghai, China. The avenue is lined with art deco buildings from the 1920s and ‘30s, when Shanghai was the New York of the Far East. The Bund was its Wall Street, home to international banks and trading houses where a handful of foreign and Chinese entrepreneurs made fortunes. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
China's biggest city and financial hub is known for designer boutiques and fine dining. Yet wallet-draining Shanghai also offers activities that cost nothing, from walking on the riverfront Bund to sculpture parks and historic sites. Here are five of them.
THE BUND
A walk along the Bund is an introduction to the essence of big, bold, fashionable, commercial Shanghai.
The avenue is lined with art deco buildings from the 1920s and '30s, when Shanghai was the New York of the Far East. The Bund was its Wall Street, home to international banks and trading houses. A handful of foreign and Chinese entrepreneurs made fortunes. The city's relative stability attracted migrants who left behind poverty and fighting among warlords elsewhere. Other areas of the city have been bulldozed to make way for office and apartment towers, but the Bund's classic appearance has been preserved and its buildings renovated.
At the Bund's north end is the Peace Hotel, one of Shanghai's most famous buildings, where celebrities such as Cole Porter stayed before World War II. Nearby is a statue of Chen Yi, the city's first communist mayor in the '50s.
Farther south, buildings including the former headquarters of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank have been renovated and now house designer shops like Ermenegildo Zegna and Cartier. At the corner of Guangdong Road, the seventh-floor terrace of restaurant M on the Bund offers a panoramic view across the river to Pudong, the financial district that was constructed from scratch over the past two decades.
The Bund's name, which rhymes with fund, comes from the Hindi word for barrier and refers to the riverside embankment where ships were loaded and unloaded. Today, the commercial piers are gone and the view of the river from the street is blocked by a floodwall built in the '90s. Visitors can climb to the top of the barrier where a wide pedestrian walkway gives a view of the river and Pudong's forest of skyscrapers, with the Oriental Pearl Television Tower looming over them.
ART DISTRICTS
The Hongfang Creative Industrial Zone, created in 2005 out of a cluster of renovated factories, houses galleries including the Shanghai Sculpture Space, open Tuesday-Sunday, which shows work by Chinese and foreign contemporary artists. The building surrounds a grassy courtyard with sculptures that include bulls and horses made of auto parts and car-size heads of Albert Einstein and former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. The district is on Weihai West Road, a five-minute walk east of the Hongqiao Road station on the No. 3 subway or 10 minutes west of Weihai West Road station on the No. 10.
The Moganshan Road Art District, on the bank of Suzhou Creek, is older, grittier and more commercial. The city's most prominent contemporary galleries - locals as well as outposts of European and U.S. galleries - are housed in converted textile factories and warehouses dating to the 1930s. Moganshan's mix of industrial and arty is a favorite backdrop for Chinese fashion photographers. It's a 20-minute walk south of the Zhongtan Station on the No. 3 or 4 subways.
SCULPTURE GARDEN
Jing'an Sculpture Park, on Beijing West Road west of the North-South Expressway, is an oasis of green among high-rise apartment blocks. The six-hectare (15-acre) park has monumental works in stone, steel and other materials by artists including American Jim Dine, Belgium's Wim Delvoye and Ram Katzir of Israel. Some are sturdy enough for children to climb. On weekends, kids skate on the sidewalks while adults play badminton on the lawn.
HISTORIC SITES
The Former Residence of Mao Zedong commemorates the period in 1924 when the future leader of China's revolution was a communist activist living in Shanghai. The two-story space has period furniture and displays on early Communist Party history. The building, wedged between small shops, is an example of shikumen, or stone gate, architecture. The home is open Tuesday-Sunday, 9 a.m.- 11:30 a.m., 1 p.m.-4:30 p.m., at No. 120 Maoming North Road, south of Weihai Road, a short walk south of the Nanjing West Road station on the No. 2 subway.
The Memorial of the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China commemorates the first party meeting in 1921 by Mao Zedong and 12 fellow leftists - including two from the Moscow-controlled Communist International. Visitors can see the parlor where the first congress was held. The memorial on Huangpi South Road and Xingye Road south of People's Square also has a museum about party history.
The party was founded in Shanghai in hopes of inspiring a revolution by the city's factory workers. But after devastating attacks by Gen. Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government, the party withdrew to the countryside, where it led a peasant uprising that became the model for rural leftists across Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Ironically, the memorial abuts the tony Xintiandi complex of boutiques and restaurants. It is a product of Deng's market-style reforms launched in the 1980s to revive an economy nearly destroyed by three decades of Soviet-style central planning.
PARKS
People's Square is the heart of modern Shanghai. Built on the site of a colonial-era horse track, it was the only large open space in the crowded city for decades until a wave of park construction in the '90s.
On the square's southern edge is the Shanghai Museum. Many items from its extensive collections of porcelains, jades, paintings and bronzes were donated by families that fled to Hong Kong following the 1949 communist victory but have since reconciled with the mainland.
To the northeast is the Urban Planning Exhibition Hall, with a scale model of Shanghai's fast-changing cityscape and exhibits on its evolution. To the northwest is the Shanghai Art Museum in the horse track's former clubhouse. It has displays of contemporary art and is the site of the Shanghai Biennale, held in even-numbered years.
The square is just south of People's Square Station on the No. 1 or 8 subways.
Fuxing Park, southwest of People's Square on the opposite side of the North-South Expressway, is a French-style park with fountains and gardens that once was part of the French Concession neighborhood during Shanghai's colonial era. In the mornings, locals dance and practice tai-chi or martial arts here.
Lu Xun Park, in the Hongkou district north of downtown, has lawns, trees and a lake. It commemorates Lu Xun, China's most prominent 20th century author, a leftist who spent his final years in Shanghai and died in 1936. His tomb in the park bears an inscription from Mao.
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AP researcher Fu Ting contributed.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Shanghai Disneyland To Open At End Of 2015
Contributed by the Huffington Post.
The Disney empire's latest outpost, Shanghai Disneyland, will open in late 2015, reports the Associated Press.
China's National Development and Reform Commission first approved the project back in 2009, and ground was first broken in April 2011. At that time it was estimatedthe park would take approximately five years to open, according to WDW News.
During a meeting with shareholders Wednesday, Disney chairman and CEO Bob Igerunveiled the first image of a model of the park. "The one-of-a-kind destination will be authentically Disney and distinctly Chinese," the DisneyParks Blog shares.
The Shanghai Disney Resort will feature a Shanghai Disneyland park, two hotels, a 46,000-square-meter retail, dining and entertainment venue, recreational facilities, a lake plus parking and transport hubs, Forbes reports. Shanghai's Cinderella Castle will be the largest and tallest of all the Disney castles.
Shanghai Disneyland will be "a Magic Kingdom-style park that will blend classic Disney storytelling and characters with all-new attractions and experiences tailored specifically for the people of China," says WDW News.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Beijing Is Not The Only Asian City With Lethal Air Pollution
A view of the Oriental Pearl TV tower and downtown Shanghai. A report in the Lancet says that worldwide, a record 3.2 million people died from air pollution in 2010, compared with 800,000 in 2000. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters
The Chinese capital is just one of hundreds of cities where poisonous air is the fastest growing cause of death
Air pollution in Beijing has been described as "apocalyptic" with people choking their way through murky streets, short of breath and their eyes stinging from toxic air. But Beijing is just one of hundreds of cities, largely in Asia, where poisonous air is now the fastest growing cause of death in urban populations.
In the past few months there have been acute air pollution incidents reported in Bangladesh, Iran, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Pakistan. In Tehran, the desperate authorities had to close all public offices, schools, universities and banks twice in the last two months; In Nepal the army has had to give up its cars and in Kabul it has been reported that there are now more deaths as a result of air and water pollution than from conflict.
Statistics are unreliable, with few cities able to monitor accurately either the source or the level of the cocktail of pollutants emitted by traffic, ships, industry, brick kilns and domestic heating. But go to the hospitals and doctors will tell you that up to 80% of people admitted come with respiratory or other chronic diseases linked to air pollution. In Tehran, more than 4,500 people were said to have died last year because of air pollution – but because cancers can take years to develop the true figure may be far higher.
Perhaps because there are no drugs available to counter air pollution, it has never been taken as seriously by governments as other diseases like HIV/Aids or malaria, even though the World Health Organisation estimates more than 2 million people worldwide die every year from bad air and that it is now among the top 10 killers in the world. But governments may have to act as new research shows it to be rapidly worsening.
The biggest study done so far, published one month ago in the Lancet suggested that, worldwide, a record 3.2 million people died from air pollution in 2010, compared with 800,000 in 2000. The annual Global Burden of Disease (GBD) report ranked air pollution for the first time in the world's top 10 list of killer diseases, with 1.2 million deaths a year in east Asia and China, and 712,000 in south Asia, including India.
But while Beijing got the headlines this week, there is mounting evidence that air pollution in India is as bad, if not worse, than in China. A study conducted by satellite imagery by Tel Aviv University last year reported that Indian megacities were seeing double digit increases in air pollution. From 2002 to 2010, said the paper, Bangalore saw the second highest increase in air-pollution levels in the world at 34%,with Pune, Mumbai, Nagpur and Ahmedabad not far behind. Improvements in car and fuel technology have been made since 2000 but these are nullified by the sheer increase in car numbers. Nearly 18m cars are expected to be sold this year alone in India.
The blame is variously levelled on the geography of cities, the inversion of temperatures especially in cold months which trap pollutants, the vastly increasing number of cars, power plants, forest fires and the boom in building construction. However, the Lancet study found that it was specifically the type of air pollution caused by car and truck exhaust that was doing the most health damage.
There is increasing evidence too that the air pollution now plaguing cities is because the fuel being burned by millions of cars and motorbikes is heavily contaminated by dealers who mix petrol and diesel with kerosene, waste industrial solvents and other additives to produce cheaper fuel. The result is a cocktail of poisonous emissions, many of which are not picked up by government monitoring stations and which are not filtered out by catalytic converters.
The scale of illegal fuel adulteration is unknown, but academic studies suggest it is rampant in poor countries like Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan, all of which depend on importing fuel from outside. One study in Nepal found that at least half the motorbikes in use had engines damaged by contaminated fuel.
But rich countries should not think their air is clean. A report by the European environment agency found that almost one third of Europe's city dwellers are exposed to PM10 particulate concentrations above EU legal limits and 90-95% to concentrations of smaller and even more deadly PM2.5 particulates. If nothing is done to improve it, the EU expects to see 200,000 premature deaths a year in Europe by 2020 due to particle emissions alone.
EU environment commissioner Janez Potočnik spelled out the financial costs on the European economy in September: "Clean air is an investment. We cannot afford not to act. In monetary terms … the associated costs [will] amount to between €189-609bn per year in 2020. Our current analysis shows that if we do nothing, we will see 200,000 premature deaths in the EU by 2020 due to particle emissions alone - but with concerted action, this number can be pushed down to 130,000. To invest in clean air means to invest in our future."
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