Annual Peony Culture Festival Kicks off in Luoyang
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S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Annual Peony Culture Festival Kicks off in Luoyang
With spring breeze caressing your face and flowers in full bloom, Luoyang invites you to admire peonies. The launch ceremony of the 41th China Luoyang Peony Culture Festival was held on March 21 at the Sui and Tang Dynasties City Ruins Botanical Garden in Luoyang. A series of well-designed immersive peony appreciating activities will be held in Luoyang's major peony gardens until May 5, with the theme of "Strolling Through Peony Sea in Luoyang".
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The theme of the launch ceremony this year is "Come and Admire Peonies in Luoyang". During the festival, major peony gardens in Luoyang, including Wangcheng Park, Sui and Tang Dynasties City Ruins Botanical Garden and China National Flower Garden, will host a variety of activities related to peony admiring, cultural performances and consumption with the philosophy of "disruptive innovation, immersive experience, youth-oriented consumption and social media-based popularization", aiming to provide tourists with an unforgettable peony admiring experience.
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I guess I'm about a week late in posting this, but the peonies are still blossoming in Luoyang, a city that was a few hours drive from Zhengzhou where I taught high school English and Australian Law for my first 6 years in China. About 13 or 14 years ago I discovered that USA1, another NT member, was teaching at a university in Kaifeng, about an hour away from Zhengzhou. We were both married to Chinese women and we visited each other and spent some good times together, one of which times was for the four of us to travel together (he had a car) to Luoyang to attend the Peony Festival.
Peonies always remind me of roses..
I love both..
Many consider the Peony to be the National Flower of China.
I took a lot of photos at the Festival, and here are some of them:
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And finally our group - Me (with a Blue Jays cap, so who else would it be?), my wife Fen, USA1 and his wife Ju-An.
Luoyuang was one of the featured cities in an episode of a documentary series about China I saw on PBS a few nights ago. Ancient, fascinating city.
Besides the Peony Festival, there are many other wonders to see in and around Luoyang which I had visited 3 or 4 times. For example there are these (all are my photos I took at those sites unless I'm in the photos, of course):
The Longmen Grottoes. Thousands of Buddhas, large and small, were carved out of the limestone mountainside. The largest one, shown here on the left is 17 metres high.
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The White Horse Temple. This is where 3 monks from India brought Buddhism to China, and were favoured by the Emperor (China's capital was located there at the time) and given land for this temple which is still active. I took the photo below there also - it is one of my best photos (IMO of course). I call it "Primary Colours".
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A Buddhist Temple that was gifted by India to China as a sign of friendship.
My wife and I are there before the statue of Buddha in that Indian gift temple..
The Geological Park.
That is one of my students from when I was teaching in Zhengzhou, whose parents invited me to visit as their guest.
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The mountain that is beside the city of Luoyang
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The River. The Yellow River, one of the largest in China, runs past Luoyang. Another of my favourite photos.
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King Park. And below is the lake that is still part of the park, on which boats can be rented.
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I was fortunate to have made good friends with government and police officials when in China. Here I am (think I had a drink or two) with the parent of one of my students, a police captain from Luoyang, at a graduation ceremony who told me that I must call him whenever I would visit there.
Very nice photos. I like the first one the best because of the subject matter. If I ever went to China again, which is unlikely, Luoyang would be one of the places I would want to visit.
Well, if you do, try to see if you can include Chongqing in your itinerary.