As a five years resident of Canton, I am shame to say that I never be to Yuexiu Park to have a look at the Statue of Five Goats by myself before. We all know that the picture of this Statue of Five Goats has been the symbol of Canton for a long time. And do you know the story about these goats?
As the Asia Game is coming, to avoid be ignorant when our guests mention that, I decided to have a visit this famous landscape.

Formerly known as Canton in the West, the city of Guangzhou has a history dating back roughly 2,500 years.

Although the actual origins of the city are lost in the midst of time, the most popular legend tells of five celestial beings riding into the area that is now Guangzhou on five rams and carrying sheaves of rice. The celestials bestowed blessings on the land and offered the sheaves to the people of the city as a symbol of prosperity and abundance. After the celestials left, the rams turned into stone, and Guangzhou quickly developed into an affluent and influential city.

Due to this legend, Guangzhou has gained several popular nicknames: Yangcheng (City of Rams), Suicheng (Sheaves of Rice City) and Wuyangcheng (City of Five Rams).

From wikipedia.org

There are many way to go to Yuexiu Park, by metro is the easy way. After get off the Metro line 2, we arrived the main gate of it.

First stop is Nanxiu Flowers Garden. Maybe those plants are very familiar, I didn’t take many photos.

Then we decided to rent a boat so that we could view the park in another way.

There is a pavilion in the center of the lake, and many elder men have their leisure time there. Look, they are playing Cantonese Opera.

Crossing the bridge… “Warning! Please drive the boats by the side way.”

This is …

Boating is really a physical work, we landed after an hour and continued go to the higher places.
Nowadays, a normal toilet room also has the “Best” title…

Here is a meadow land bowling field. When is meadow land bowling? I don’t know neither… Sounds interesting.

There is a saying that if you hadn’t been to Zhenhai Tower, you didn’t come to Canton. Zhenhai Tower is also a symbol of Canton.

Zhenhai Tower is also the Museum of Canton.

After that, we finally arrived the Five Goats Statue. It’s much bigger than the size I expected. And I knew that it was built at 60s based the legend of five rams. We can see that these goats of statue is so vivid and beautiful.

This image is the most famous picture of Canton. We can see it everywhere, even the electric traffic card:

Guess where has I been? Maybe you would say France, UK, European Countries, USA or….
But… actually, I didn’t made any foreign trip before. Here is still where I am now, at Canton , south of China.

So let me show you the position where we go now.
The “Stone House” cathedral is located at 56 Yide Lu (or Yat Tak Road), Canton. Being on the north bank of the Pearl River, the cathedral stands at the heart of the busy old district. The cathedral, like most of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe, is built of solid masonry, including the vaulted roof and the towers. The stone used for the building is granite. For this reason, it is nicknamed “Stone House” (石室) by local people.

Then “Stone House” is just the nick name of it, the really name of this cathedral is “Cathedral of the Sacred Heart of Jesus”, also known as Sacred Heart Cathedral. The site of the cathedral was originally the residence of the Viceroy of Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces (兩廣總督) in the Qing Dynasty.

Is it like those cathedrals at Paris? I think anyone came here would confused whether he is at France. Actually, the fact is this cathedral was really built as the same way like those ones at Paris. Though it is widely said that the design was based on the Notre Dame de Paris and sometimes it is referred to as the “Notre Dame in the Far East”, the cathedral was actually inspired by the Basilica of St. Clotilde in Paris. Covering an area of 2,754 square metres, it is the largest Roman Catholic church in the Guangzhou archdiocese and the largest cathedral in the Gothic style in China and Southeast Asia. The cathedral is 35 metres wide, 78.69 metres long, and the twin towers rise as high as 58.5 metres. The west tower is a clock tower while the east tower serves as a bell tower, inside which there are five gigantic bronze bells shipped in from France in the 19th century.

So let’s wander around outside first~

The clock tower~~

We discovered these two famous stones:
The foundation of the cathedral was laid on June 18, 1863, the Feast of the Sacred Heart, and work began on August 26. The ground breaking ceremony was held on December 8 of the same year. Two foundation stones were laid. The Latin words “Jerusalem 1863″ were engraved on the east one and the words “Roma 1863″ on the west one, stating that the Roman Catholic Church had its origin in Jerusalem in the east and evolved in Rome in the west. From each city, one kilogram of soil was taken to be combined and laid under the two foundation stones.

Fortunately, we were allowed to enter the cathedral. Tough I am not a catholic, I still got shocked by the holiness.

Fantasy windows with colorful glass Just like those in great cathedral in the West. The solar comes through it and changes into beautiful multi-color ray.

It said that Sacred Heart Cathedral is one of the four Gothic Cathedrals with total rock architecture in the world. “Stone House” has been one famous sight spot. And as the largest Roman Catholic church in the Guangzhou archdiocese, many catholics, includes lots of foreigners come here for worships. In deed, we met quite a lot of them.

Lotus Resort has its rich historical and cultural relics within. The history of Ancient Quarry can be traced back to Xihan Dynasty, which is over 2000 years ago. Through out thousands of years of natural weathering, the ever excavated cliffs and caves have turned into marvelous landscape as a whole. In all its majestic and variety, it is well known as its unique spectacle which goes by the comment of “manpower exceeded nature’s engineering undesignedly”. And was approved as one of the National Preservation Unit of key Cultural Relic by the State Council in 2001. As for ancient architecture,there are also Lotus Pagoda built in Ming Dynasty(1612 A.D) and Lotus Wall built in Qing Dynasty (1664 A.D), both of which are preserved unit o provincial level.

Make short of long, we were going to see lots of rocks! Let’s rock~

After leaving the giant Kwan-yin statue I mentioned at the last post, we went into a wild area. Here is full of forest and rocks, and different from where we have been before. We passed through a long path which twists many times and finally find the famous cliff marked on the map, the Fling Eagle Cliffs. As the name of it, we can imagine how steep they are. And actually, they are not only steep, the shapes of they are almost like a standing books, impossible for climbing. But… there are really some huge characters (means Fling Eagle Cliff)craved on one of the cliffs. How can human make it

We didn’t find the eagles on there, but we got some others, some little birds on the top of one cliff. Obviously They are the big stars now

Here is a good site for view. We can see the sea and the harbor at the other side. Many ships, Lots of arms of cranes and uncountable containers, make a good picture of a story about human and the sea.

Oh, BTW, We found a big lotus pool not far away from the Fling Eagle Cliffs, There are quite a lot of lotus flowers there~

In order to catch this picture, I spent at least ten shots at this little naughty bee. It really didn’t know to be a good model.

Back to the “way of rock”, we saw pavilion high upon a huge(maybe you would say how many time do I use this adj. word, but actually they are huge… And there are going to be more “huge” ) cliff, Let’s go and take a chance to have a rest~~

This pavilion is called Lingnan Pavilion. Maybe you would be interested about the couplets, just click to enlarge it, because we are going to show more and more ancient poems, ancient proses that carved on those huge guys

The path was twisted many times that made us so confused about our location that we can only follow the signposts. The signpost said that the next site was the Lion Rock. Where is the Lion? Oh, I found it here~ Do you see it?

Many many rock cut neatly form many caves and pools and cliffs. They formed a fantasy world of rocks


What was the little turtle looking forward? the statue of the ? That would be the story of Prince Turtle~

There is no reason that nobody left some words of praise for such beautiful place. Poem, proses can be seen everywhere.

This rock is called “100 words of good fortune” because there are 100 characters in different font styles of the same word, “福”, which means good fortune in Chinese.

What’s this? I think it is a lizard. Why does it appear at this place?

The next stop is very famous and has a beautiful name, the Swallow Cliff. I think maybe many swallows come to this cliff to build their nests here upon the cliff so it got this name. We didn’t find any swallow this time maybe the swallows didn’t come back in this season. But the cliffs and lotus follows really killed many memory of our camera.

Our physical power is running down, we had to find the way out. Our journey was nearly over, finally let’s back to the Lotus Lake to see the lovely flowers again~

The rain drops started to fall suddenly when we got off the metro. We must made a decision whether to go ahead or fall back . Maybe the god was inspired and moved by our courage, the sky became more and more clear after we finished a simple lunch.

We got the gate of Lotus Hill park and bought two tickets. With a handy pager about Lotus Hill, we can learned more about it.

Lianhuashan(literally means the Lotus Hill)Resort, Covering an area of 2.33 square km and with 108meters above sea level, is situated by the bank of Lion Sea and the estuary of Pearl River, thus it is provided with superior location and convenient communication. As a scenic spot combing the ancient ruggedness with the modern grace, it was awarded laureate titles such as “Top 8 Tourist Attractions of the New Century in Guangzhou City” and “National AAAA Tourist Attraction”, etc.

Here is the main gate of Lotus Hill Park, anyway just take a photo of it. Lotus Hill park is famous for her beautiful natural views and green colors very where. We were very lucky that there were very few people came here today. Maybe we have to thank the typhoon. Let’s take a shot of this cool bull~ and also for this lovely lawn and trees.

Because of the developing for tourism, there is a big motor road goes straightly to the top, that make going to the top easier. As to skip this boring man-made concrete road, we decided to rent a tourism small motor.

Passing some new man-made sight spot such like follower garden and children’s playground etc., we got to the Lotus Pagoda which stand highly on the top of Lotus Hill:

Lotus Pagoda was built in 1612, that means it almost 400 years old . There are 9 floors of this bricked architecture pagoda and make it a height of 50 meters. And in 1981, some personalities from HongKong donate funds to repair this pagoda. And now what I want to do is to climb this pagoda

Frankly speaking, it’s quite a tough job to climb, because the stairs are so narrow and steep. When I get to the last floor at the top of it, I almost breathed heavily. And of course, here is a good site to take nice photos~

up and down

What a huge Kwan-yin statue. That’s where we were heading for later.

OK, Now I was totally ran out of energy after back to the ground of the hill top … But we still had lots places to go, so we moved on after having a few minutes short rest.

This folk artisan was working on a pager. This is painting or a writing? Can you figure what he was writing?

After that, we can see the large Kwan-yin statue facing the sea. It’s so large the I had to take photos from a long distant to catch the whole image.

Some people nearby said that it would change its facing direction
Do you believe it?

Let’s look around here and find other spots:
Many people come here to pray:

Quite a nice pagoda near the temple. also a pool used to free the turtles.

So we were finished the half trip of Lotus. Then we would take another totally different way down from the hill. That was the other exciting adventure. See you at Lotus Hill – Part 2@ Ancient Quarry