Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Beijing attractions: Wangfujing Commercial street and Beijing snack

Wangfujing street is one of the busiest commercial and tour center of Beijing City. Walk along the famous commercial street, you may notice countless historical and traditional Chinese elements. And obviously, the snacks street is the most popular place as all kinds of snacks from local and other place of China assemble here.


The snacks street covers more than 2000 square meters' area, operates all day long. In addition to snacks, traditional Chinese folk arts and crafts sold on old-fashioned booths and some skilled craftsmen demonstrate their unique skills here. Walk along the busy street, shops and stalls hang up their respective flags and signs while selling cheers as chorus.



Well-knowned Wangfujing snack street so as called "Golden street" shows a colorful Beijing city to domestic and overseas tourists. The street is rich of creativity in design. It mixed the classical architecture with the local street custom. At the entrance to the street, a ten-meter-high antique arches stands there as the portal. The whole street is divide into 4 regions with all the buildings in Ming and Qing architectural style and different patterns.




At night, when Wangfujing street turns on its ever increasing number of neon advertising signs, even more crowds flock to soak up the atmosphere. The neons can now be compared to those of any major city in the world and are very popular with the tourists, especially those coming from less developed parts of China. Most shops stay open till around 9pm and sometimes an impromptu night market.

Getting to Wangfujing is pretty easy. You can take the subway and get off at the Line 1 Wangfujing (118) station. Alternatively, you can of course take the taxi. Show the following to the driver:

王府井大街

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

China tour guide: Red Cliff - Ancient Chinese war from Google map to yangtze cruise

You may plan for a spring China tour. So turn on your computer and locate Google Maps, set the language to be Chinese, you may pick up some suprise. And my recommendation below is for your reference as many foreigners have great interest in a Yangtze cruise. Let's talk about it begin with a popular film, Red Cliff, directed by John Woo.

Jan.4, A grand opening ceremony of the world for John Woo's second part of "Red Cliff" held in Beijing. Great history encounters great production. "Heroes reunites and epic returns." As media left such comments, even the internet giant Google comes recently and joins in this bustling.

If you're accustomed to using Chinese version of Google maps, you could find a link "新!赤壁之战地图,自现一千八百年前的三足鼎立时代”(New! Maps of the Battle of Red Cliff, reproduced three kingdom 1,800 years before ) The new product released in recent days is fulled of reativity which combined the Chinese ancient history, geography with morden technology. Further more, it makes knowledge of history, ancient geography spread by melting it into film and TV entertainment.

On the map, we can see that Red Cliff (Chibi) is located in the south of Hubei Province, north to Wuhan, and Yueyang city, known as "the southern gate of Hubei", in the south. It has 1723 suqare kilometers' area and 500,000 of population with world-renowned long history. AD 208, in the Eastern Han Dynasty, Sun Quan and Liu Bei made the alliance and resisted against Cao Cao. They planed the earthshaking battle in the local town and created the situation of three kingdoms which brought great compact to Chinese history.


Take a cruise, you will see the two Chinese characters "赤壁"(red cliff) engraved on the scarp of Yangtze River's south bank. Story says it was titled by Zhou Yu after he defeated Cao Cao. Now, war had already gone, only the rolling Yangtze River is east evanescent and tell us the glorious legend.

Attractions like ancient battlefields of Red Cliff War has been kept and protected as national-level historical unit while it was circled by other monuments with mountains stand by and islands spread all over the land-water lake scenic area. Filming base of "Water Margin City" located here and is in the building of national land-water lake tourist resort in current days. Water of hot spring here was adviced to drink and bath desirable as its medical fitness by experts. Further more, the largest clay dam of land water reservoir, underground grottos and summer resort surrounded with gardens filled with bamboo, tea and fruits. Picturesque natual scenery and rich historical culture made Chibi an tourist paradise.



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