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Taian
When Tai'an is mentioned, most people think of the famous Mount Taishan which is located here. As the first of the five sacred mountains in China, it has been listed in the World Cultural and Natural Heritage by UNESCO. Dating back to ancient Chinese times, Mount Taishan has long been a well-known attraction steeped in religious atmosphere. In ancient times, many emperors made a special trip to it to pray to the gods for the well being of the nat...
- Taishan Mountain was called Mount Dai or Daizong in ancient times. It has beautiful natural sights and collects famous historic and cultural sites.
- The sunrise of Taishan Mountain is one of Taishan Mountain's most famous spectacles. Along with the first light of day breaking out the darkness before the dawn, the eastern canopy of the heaven changes to white like a fish's belly; then red; then dazzling golden yellow, spraying out myriads of sun rays at the same time; and finally, the sun seems like a fireball rising high into the sky.
- After the rain washes the sky, and when the evening sun is falling down from the clouds gradually, and spilling the soft after glow to the Taishan Mountain, looking up to the western sky, you can find that the scenery on the peak is colored layer by layer and that the color of the clouds is colorful under the glowing of the evening sum, which looks too mysterious to be understood.
- The rain stops and the sky clears up, you can often see that the white clouds extend ten thousand li, just like a giant jade plate floating between the sky and the earth. The mountains and hills for away are all engulfed in the clouds, only a few peaks exposing out of the clouds. When the breeze blows, the sea of the clouds waves, accompanied with all peaks emerging and disappearing alternately, which look like the unpredictable fairy islands, and the tourists nearby seem to be flying and traveling on the clouds in the sky.
- The soft rime and glaze ice are the peculiar natural phenomena of Taishan Mountain. The soft rime looks like frost but not frost, and looks like ice but not ice, just like flowers in full bloom in the wind. The branches of pines and trees are covered with the downy ice hung, as if they are giant white coral. The rime covers the buildings like soft light silk, and it spreads out on the ground, which looks like the white blanket. The glaze ice makes the ice layers form on the rock, gr4ound, roofs and trees, creating an icy world.
- In the mornings or evenings full of clouds and mist, standing on the high peaks, and viewing in the same direction as the light, tourists may see a colorful halo with blue color inside and red color outside present on the dimly discernible mist veil. In the middle of the halo, a human figure is reflected, and it looks just like the colorful halo over the head of the Buddha, so it is called "the Buddhist Light" or "the Treasure Light".
- Qufu is a quaint, rural Chinese town with an ancestral temple, a forest cemetery, and the mansion of a family clan that did really well in Chinese history: the Kong clan. On the face of things, that hardly makes the town stand out, but it is the Kong family that makes Qufu so special. In fact, 125,000 of Qufu's 630,000 residents are still surnamed Kong.
- Qufu's temple is dedicated to Master Kong (Kong fuzi, in Chinese). And that name, along with the title, has become anglicized as "Confucius." The home town of China's most famous scholar and philosopher, Qufu also served as the capital of the State of Lu during the Spring and Autumn Period (770¨C476 BC) of the Zhou Dynasty.
- A visit to the Confucious hometown will let you know the principles of Confucianism and why it affected china culture so deep.
- Learn the sepcial status of Mt. Taishan, the No.1 of China's 5 famous daoist mountains.
