Today, although I am on the downhill
side of the flu-like bug I picked up, I am still pretty much reliant
on Lucie to get me to and fro. Our first item for this morning is a
flight from Guilin to Guangzhou and I managed to make the trip
without incident, partly because Liu arranged for me to sit in
business class and partly because it was only an hour flight.
In Guangzhou, our first stop was a
statue of five goats. This granite statue was erected in 1959 to
honor the city's symbol. Legend has it that 5 celestial beings
brought 5 goats carrying rice into Guangzhou in order to prevent the
citizens from ever having to experience famine. Guangzhou, known as
the City of Goats, has many goat statues but the Five Goats Status is
the largest.
From the Goat Statue we visited a
museum of the Ancestral Temple of the Chen Family. During the Qing
Dynasty, 1700's, if you wanted to work for the government you had to
pass an examination that was very difficult. Chen passed the exam and
placed third in the entire country making him somewhat of a celebrity
around Guangzhou. The entire Chen extended family raised money to
build the temple to motivate the next generation of Chen's to study
as hard and be successful.
I was unable to accompany the group on
this visit, so I provide a few file photos below.
The
group enjoyed lunch and we headed out for an hour and a half bus ride
to Zhongshan where we would the spend our last night on mainland
China, at the Sheraton Zhongshan Hotel, before heading out tomorrow to Macau.
No comments:
Post a Comment