Zhengzhou is the capital city of Henan Province situated in the middle of China. It is a Chinese historical city.
One of the unique places to visit is the Henan Museum. It is one of the oldest museums in China located in Songshan Lu, west part of the railway station in the old government quarter. It is a history and archaeology museum with a collection of 130,000 pieces of cultural relics through the ages. Henan Museum’s current building has an area of more than 100,000 square feet, with a floor space of 78,000 square feet.
The tourists are amazed with the spectacular entrance and central atrium where a spiral staircase will bring you to the top. The glass roof at the top of the atrium is awesome, too.
Each floor housed a different historical artifacts from 5000 years of Chinese history including bronze and pottery of porcelain.
Longmen Grottos is a UNESCO world cultural heritage site as “an outstanding manifestation of human artistic creativity” located in Luoyang China. It is the world’s biggest Buddhist cave treasury with thousands of stone carvings. Grottoes were carved into 97,000 Buddha statues. The grottoes were carved on the mountain on both sides of Yi river. The work on the grottos began in 493 AD.
The grottos and niches of Longmen has the largest and most impressive collection of Chinese art of the late Northern Wei and Tang Dynasty.
The tourists who visited the place were amazed with the beauty and history.
Shaolin Temple is famous for its association with martial arts and Zen Buddhism. It is monastic institution renowned as the birthplace of Zen Buddhism and cradle of Shaolin Kung Fu. Its location at the foot of Wuru Peak of the Shongshan mountain range in Dengfeng county, Henan province. It is located 72 km southwest of Zhengzhou, modern capital of Henan province, and 48 km southeast of Louyang, former capital of Northern Wei Dynasty.
From approximately 1000 BC, Chinese astronomical mythology declared Mount Song to be “the center of Heaven and Earth.” It was respected as such by the successive dynasties of the Chinese Empire. In about 490 AD, Batuo, a Buddhist monk from India, arrived in China. He translated Buddhist scriptures to Chinese and trained monks in martial arts. The
Emperor Xiaowen of Northern Wei helped him build the Shaolin Temple on the side of Mont Song in about 495 AD.
A second Indian monk, Bodhidharma, a Zen Buddhist missionary who traveled for decades throughout China, arrived at Shaolin about 527. The Shaolin Temple community gradually grew to become the center of Chinese Zen Buddhism and known for “Shaolin Kung Fu.”
Various wars over the centuries (including during the Cultural Revolution) forced the monks to abandon the temple and destroyed most of the buildings, but each time, the monks returned and rebuilt the buildings in the same style. In 1996, It was listed as a national key cultural relic protection unit and in 2010 become a United Nations World Heritage Site.
