Travel Blog: China Trip

Day 2

After about 14 hours of journey from Guang Dong to Fu Jian, Quan Zhou, finally we reached to a Taiwan style restaurant at 7.45am. The service from the restaurant is quite bad, they doesn't serve their customer accordingly; just simply serve, just send the dishes to the table which they got order, not serve according to "who comes who first". Still, they also didn't know how much dishes that has been served, because they didn't record it. So, overall the management is bad.

Picture 2.1 - Me in front of the Taiwanese style restaurant.

The temperature in the morning was very low, is almost about 5 celcius degree. I couldn't take this such cold temperature, so I wore one more sweater. After our breakfast, we took some photos around the restaurant and then straight to the bus for our next journey. The next journey that we're going is the "Guan Ti" Temple. Guan Ti is the Guang Gong (A warrior in the Three Kingdoms, where his skins are red in colour) which has been granted the King position.

Picture 2.2 - Me in front of Guan Ti Temple.

Picture 2.3 - Front View of Guan Ti Temple.

On 9.45am, we went to a temple which had more than 1000 years of history. The name of the temple is Kai Yuan Shi (Note: Kuan Ti Temple and Kai Yuan Shi are located at Quan Zhou). Initially when I reach to the front door of the temple, I thought that the temple was small and quite old. The main door are a small temple with the Four Guardians of Heaven inside, The structure is mainly with wood and stone and the structure doesn't require any nails to build. Below shows some photos that I'd taken in front of the Kai Yuan main door.

Picture 2.4 - The front road of the Kai Yuan Shi main entrance.

Picture 2.5 - Inside the Kai Yuan Temple's main entrance.

Once the whole group starts to walk to the back door of the simple small temple, I found out that the real Kai Yuan Shi was actually at behind of this temple, the area was really big and there's two tall pagoda tower on the left and the right of the area. A special things that we could find in Kai Yuan Temple are the architecture of the structure. The pagoda are made of stones which had been crafted initially then place on top of each stone one by one. Beside the pagoda, the roof of the temple are build mainly with wood, and how they joint the woods are certainly magnificent, different dynasty will have different type of roof combination, which also have different meaning depend on the type of the roof.

Picture 2.6 - Front view of Kai Yuan Temple.

Picture 2.7 - The side road to the Kai Yuan Temple.

Picture 2.8 - The temple, with many Buddha inside.

Picture 2.9 - Me and the pagoda.

Picture 2.10 - The entrance of the pagoda.

Picture 2.11 - "Kai Yuan Shi".

Picture 2.12 - The map for Kai Yuan Temple.

Once we finished our visit in Kai Yuan Temple, we straight away go to the Qing Yuan Shan to visit the statue of the Lao Zi.

Picture 2.13 - The front view of the Qing Yuan Shan entrance.

Picture 2.14 - Me and Lao Zi on the right.

Picture 2.15 - Lao Zi and Confucius, and me the silly guy.

Picture 2.16 - The statue of Lao Zi.

At about 12.00pm, we went to the museum called "Quan Zhou Bou Wu Guan" (= Quan Zhou Museum). In this museum, I can learn a bit historical things in Quan Zhou (because I don't know Chinese language :( ). In the museum I saw an antique coin named "one with broad sword beat five thousand soldiers" (= yi tao ping wu qian), you should come and check it out. Besides that I also learned that there's an invention by Chinese named Hydro-Driven Astronomical Instrument Station which used to observed the sun, moon and stars which later on 19th century the Western used this hydro-techs to create a seated clock.

Picture 2.17 - Front view of the Quan Zhou Museum.

Picture 2.18 - A structure that looks like the top of the Hydro-Driven Astronomical Instrument Station located in front of the museum.

After an house of museum visit, we went to a restaurant located next to a museum, which I will go later on. After lunch, we continue our journey to the next museum called "Zhong Guo Min Tai Yuan Bou Wu Kuan". There's nothing much that excited me during this visit, except one thing, an art presented in the entrance of the museum, picture 2.21 till picture 2.23 shows something which had shock me so much.

Picture 2.19 - The restaurant that we went for lunch.

Picture 2.20 - The "Zhong Guo Min Tai Yuan Bou Wu Kuan"

Picture 2.21, 2.22 and 2.23 - An tree portrait with Chinese poem disappear and then reappear.

In the beginning, when I first saw this three story height portrait, I took the first picture. Later I felt that I should take another one or two to compare which is the best to put in the blog. Then when I view my pictures, I then found out that the Chinese words are slowing fade away and then slowly reappear. The way they do it is by the light with Chinese word pattern flash to the back of the portrait.

On 3.00pm, we start heading to a hotel named "Tow Yuan" which located at Yong Chun. The journey to Yong Chun from Quan Zhou are about 2 hours by bus. When we reached to the hotel, we straight to our rooms and have some rest. (The picture for the hotel will be post on the next post)

On 7.18pm, after we had enough rest, we start moving to a village, where all the villagers surname are the same; Tan (Chan in cantonese, Chen in mandarin and Chin in hakka). In about 20 minutes of travelling by van, we finally reach to a simple house, which really does have some ancient Chinese house environment. When we reached to the front of the house, we're being ushered to go into the house by Mr. Tan, which is my boss friend. The house is small, but it really can fit about 32 people. We had our dinner in the house, one thing which really shocked my during that time, in this such a small house, they can prepare such a large amount of food for all of us, and we all can't finish all. Let us talk about the dishes, there's one bowl of duck soup, which really taste the same as bak kut teh in klang, but isn't 100% the same the same, as we in klang are using pork and they're using duck. In this night, i finally for the first time having a noodle for a meal, the house owner had prepare a big bowl of mee sua called "o mee sua" which really tasted magnificent.