Had the opportunity to visit Longmen Grottoes back in April.
Wikipedia: The Longmen Grottoes or Longmen Caves are some of the finest examples of Chinese Buddhist art. Housing tens of thousands of statues of Buddha and his disciples, they are located 12 kilometres south of present-day Luòyáng in Hénán province, China.
The site is one of the UNESCO World Heritage sites.
We paid RMB100 for entrance. The area is rather huge and The weather was so fine that day. I got sunburn on my forehead 😛 Be sure to wear a hat if you don’t want to get burnt hahaha…
Here’s some general information found at the entrance. Well… Great effort for having dual language albeit funny ones hahah…
The scenery is not bad. However, could see many steel rods coming up in the middle of the trees which are all solar panels and transmission towers to cater for mobile devices needs. QR Code signboards are also everywhere too. This is how advance the Chinese are now.
Wikipedia: There are as many as 100,000 statues within the 2,345 caves, ranging from an 1 inch (25 mm) to 57 feet (17 m) in height. The area also contains nearly 2,500 stelae and inscriptions, whence the name “Forest of Ancient Stelae”, as well as over sixty Buddhist pagodas. Situated in a scenic natural environment, the caves were dug from a 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) stretch of cliff running along both banks of the river. 30% date from the Northern Wei Dynasty and 60% from the Tang, caves from other periods accounting for less than 10% of the total.Starting with the Northern Wei Dynasty in 493 AD, patrons and donors included emperors, Wu Zetian of the Second Zhou Dynasty, members of the royal family, other rich families, generals, and religious groups.
So many tourists, most of them are domestic tourists. The place is always filled with people! Even the walking paths, stairs, and handrails turned so slippery and shinny from the frictions endured daily. No doubt the facilities are well maintained.
The site management also set up places where tourists can interact or get up close with some of the items there. The flowery rock is known as Chrysanthemum stone.
The relics are all surrounded by fence because people like to touch it! We could see the previous fence was built nearer to the relics. Now they built it further away to avoid people from touching it. The damages done by visitors are very obvious where the relics were “polished” because of all the touchings until it become smooth and shiny.The text that couldn’t be read before can now be read *LOL*
How grand and huge the place is… These are just part of the attractions.
You can also go on the boat if you are lazy to walk to the exit because there is a lot of walking needed. We lost our direction and got off the boat at the wrong jetty 😛 Ended up had to walk for quite a distance to get ourselves out of the place.
Anyway, looking at how the Chinese develop and maintain their tourist attractions, it gave me goosebumps. When will we be able to reach that standard? Are we able to cope with such influx of them coming to our state? We are still very far lagging behind. Imagine our national parks become like this? I hope it won’t happen…
