英语杂志thesceneryofchina.doc

SuZhou classical GardensThe Lingering Garden was listed from the first as cultural relics of national importance in 1961. With an area of 23,310 sq.m.it is celebrated for its artistic way of dealing with the spaces between various kinds of architectural form.Buildings make up one third of the total area of the garden,the hall of which being the most remarkable in Suzhou. The garden is separated into the middle ,eastern,northern and western parts. The ancestral temple and the house lie to the south of the garden.Featuring man-made mountain and lake scenery in the west and garden courts in the east,the middle part of the garden is the original site of the Xus East Garden and the Lius Hanbi Villa,and is regarded as the best part of the whole garden. The eastern,northern and western parts are the extensions of the Shengs Garden. The eastern part is noted for its strangely shaped limestones,the northern part idyllic scenes,and the western part the delights of woody hills.A winding roofed walkway behind the small entrance of the garden,while leading to the places of quietude,shows the masterly use of contrast between big and small,straight and zigzag,and light and shade. After strolling for about 50 meters,one can catch a glimpse of lattice-windows revealing a half visible landscape garden behind. Interestingly enough,the view is changing at every step.The middle part of the garden is centered upon a lake with man-made moutain in the north-west and a numger of attractive buildings in the southwest ,such as the Hanbi Moutain Villa ,the Pellucid Tower,the Green Shade Pavilion,the Zigzag Stream Tower,the Hao Pu Pavilion,and the Refreshing Breeze Pavilion by the lake.The mountains made mainly of yellowstones and earth,believed to be desigtned and piled up by Zhou Binzhong,look very much archaic and splendiferous.The admirable Crane House, the Small Garden of Stone Forest, the Return-to-Read Study in the east with the Celestial Hall of Five Peaks as the chief stucture are laid out in such a way that the indoor spaces have been brought into perfect harmony with the outdoor spaces. With an evocation of infinity,they are successfully made to be labyrinthine.Flanked by the Auspicious Cloud and Mountainous Cloud peaks,the 6.5-meter-high Cloud-Capped Peak, the highest limestone in the classical gardens of Suzhou, is believed to be left behind by the imperial collector of the Northern Song Dynasty,Mass of buildings, including the Old Hermit Scholars House, the Cloud-Capped Tower,the Cloud-Capped Terrace and the Awaiting Cloud Temple,are put up to give emphasis to the Cloud-Capped Tower,The northern part is now a bonsai garden in which about 500 valuable bonsai are put on display.The western part of the garden sets a fine example of good-looking earthen hills studded with yellowstones and covered with maple trees.There is a winding brook lined with peach trees and weeping willows.The number of stelae in the Lingering Garden has never been surpassed by any other gardens in Suzhou.Superbly inscribed with the works of more than a hundred calligraphers in the Jin,Tang,Song,Yuan,Ming ,and Qing Dynasties, these invaluable stelae bring to light the evolutionary course of Chinese calligraphy in the past 1,000 years.The whole garden possesses with pride 42 rooms and halls , a 670-meter-long roofed walkway,200 lattice-windows of different kinds, 44 parallel couplets and stone carvings , 373 stelae,and 17 such valuable old trees as gingkoes,southern wistaria,etc. which fall into 8 catalogues.Wuzhen lies at the north of Tongxiang City. This small town, with its black tiled and timber framework houses, contrasts sharply with its white walls and gray flagging, bringing to mind a Chinese ink and wash painting. The morning of Wuzhen starts with women washing clothes by the clear river and black wooden windows propped up. The river running through the town was once the main means of transportation for local people. Much of the fame of Wuzhen Town can be attributed to Mao Dun, a great modern writer and the first cultural minister of the Peoples Republic. Born in Wuzhen, Mao has described the town with great warmth in several of his novels, and his former dwelling is preserved here. If you want to enjoy a peaceful Wuzhen, get up before 7 oclock in the morning and have a walk along the street. There are several teahouses by the river, all clean, comfortable and pleasant. Have glue rice balls as breakfast. Or sip green tea by a teahouse window, while admiring the pastoral scenery of this ancient riverside town.In 641, after marrying Princess Wencheng, Songtsen Gampo decided to build a grand palace to accommodate her and let his descendants remember the event. However, the original palace was destroyed due to a lightening strike and succeeding warfare during Landamas reign. In seventeenth century under the reign of the Fifth Dalai Lama, Potala was rebuilt. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama expanded it to todays scale. The monastery-like palace, reclining against and capping Red Hill, was the religious and political center of old Tibet and the winter palace of Dalai Lamas. The palace is more than 117 meters (384 feet) in height and 360 (1180 feet) in width, occupying a building space of 90 thousand square meters. Potala is composed of White Palace and Red Palace. The former is for secular use while the later is for religious. The White Palace consists of offices, dormitories, a Buddhist official seminary and a printing house. From the east entrance of the palace, painted with images of Four Heavenly Kings, a broad corridor upwards leads to Deyang Shar courtyard, which used to be where Dalai Lamas watched operas. Around the large and open courtyard, there used to be a seminary and dormitories. West of the courtyard is the White Palace. There are three ladder stairs reaching inside of it, however, the central one was reserved for only Dalai Lamas and central government magistrates dispatched to Tibet. In the first hallway, there are huge murals describing the construction of Potala Palace and Jokhang Temple and the procession of Princess Wencheng reaching Tibet. On the south wall, visitors will see an edict signed with the Great Fifths handprint. The White Palace mainly serves as the political headquarter and Dalai Lamas living quarters. The West Chamber of Sunshine and the East Chamber of Sunshine lie as the roof of the White Palace. They belonged to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama and the Fourteenth Dalai Lama respectively. Beneath the East Chamber of Sunshine is the largest hall in the White Palace, where Dalai Lamas ascended throne and ruled Tibet. The Red Palace was constructed after the death of the Fifth Dalai Lama. The center of the complicated Red Palace is the Great West Hall, which records the Great Fifth Dalai Lamas life by its fine murals. The scene of his visit to Emperor Shunzhi in Beijing in 1652 is extraordinarily vivid. It also has finely carved columns and brackets. The hall has four additional chapels. The West Chapel houses three gold stupas of the Fifth, Tenth and Twelfth Dalai Lamas. Their mummified and perfumed bodies are well kept in those stupas. Among the three, the Fifth Dalai Lamas stupa is the biggest, which is made of sandalwood, wrapped in gold foil and decorated with thousands of diamonds, pearls, agates and others gems. The stupa, with a height of 14.86 meters (49 feet), spends more than 3,700 kilograms of gold. The North Chapel contains statues of Sakyamuni, Dalai Lamas and Medicine Buddha, and stupas of the Eighth, Ninth and Eleventh Dalai Lamas. Against the wall is Tanjur (Beijing edition), a most important Tibetan Buddhist sutra sent to the Seventh Dalai Lama by Emperor Yongzheng. In the East Chapel a two meters (6.5 feet) high statue of Tsong Khapa, the founder of Gelugpa which is Dalai Lamas lineage, is enshrined and worshipped. In addition, about 70 famous adepts in Tibetan Buddhism surround him. The South Chapel is where a silver statue of Padmasambhava and 8 bronze statues of his reincarnations are enshrined. On the floor above, there is a gallery which has a collection of 698 murals, portraying Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, Dalai Lamas and great adepts and narrating jataka stories and significant Tibetan historic events. West of the Great West Hall locates the Thirteenth Dalai Lamas stupa hall. Since he was regarded as great as the Great Fifth, people started to build his stupa after his death in the fall of 1933. Taking three years, the stupa is comparable with the Great Fifths stupa. It is 14 meters (46 feet) in height, coated with a ton (2200 pounds) of gold foils. In front of it is a mandala made of more than 200,000 pearls and other gems. Murals in the hall tell important events in his life, including his visit with Emperor Guangxu. The highest hall of Potala was built in 1690. It used to be the holy shrine of Chinese Emperors. Dalai Lamas would come here with his officials and high lamas to show their respects to the central government annually before.Brief description: Ping Yao is an exceptionally well-preserved example of a traditional Han Chinese city, founded in the 14th century. Its urban fabric is an epitome of the evolution of architectural styles and town planning in Imperial China over five centuries. Of special interest are the imposing buildings associated with banking, for which Ping Yao was the center for the whole of China in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The perimeter of this square city is 6.4 kilometers long and the city wall is the earliest and largest intact city wall in China. The one that stands now was built early in the Ming Dynasty and is 12 meters high with an average width of five meters Its body is rammed earth strengthened with a covering of bricks. There are crenels, a water drainage system and the top is floored with bricks. Outside the city wall there is a moat four meters wide and four meters deep. The city has six gates, twoon the east wall and two on the west and one on the south and one on the north. All the gales project outwards and have two doors each. The city has resulted in the name of Turtle City with the two gates on the south and north representing the head and tail of the head and tail of the turtle and four gates on the east and west as the four legs. The two doors on the south or on the north stand opposite to each other, like the head of the turtle extending out and two wells just beyond southern gate are like a turtles two eyes. The outer door of the north gate turns east like the tail of a turtle turned to the right. There is a tower at each gate and seven-meter-high towers at each corner. Along the wall there are platforms 50 meters apart, 3,000 crenels on the outer wall and 72 watchtowers.The streets, old government offices, shops and residential houses inside the city retain their original styles and shapes and are a model for research on a county town seat of the Ming Dynasty. The city is under national protection.I have palned for Mount Tai for a long time, on one hand I just want to touch the legend in taishan culture, on the other hand is to see my high school classmates the talented beautiful girl Yang ,another is to relax with the buddy.Yesterday, I returned from mount tai, with no happiness of feeling the culture, for I just met the businessman who were treacherous,all the things sold there were so expensive that I really cant bear .I just want to forget all these aweful experience.Qing qing my classmate,she is a little fat, many a little bit, but just the girl who loves