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<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]-->THE SCENE OF WHITE CLOUD MOUNTAIN
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                 White Cloud Mountain (Bai Yun Shan in Chinese) is located five kilometres from Jiaxian County, Shaanxi Province of China.  It is about 65 kilometres from the Great Wall in Yulin City.  There is a huge set of temples.  The mountain looks as if white clouds are often around it, so the people gave it this name – White Cloud Mountain.  The temples in White Cloud Mountain were originally built in the Song Dynasty.  However, the main construction was built in the Ming and Qing Dynasties.  One of the Ming emperors, Yijong Zhu, gave an imperial edict and ordered his officials to write 4,726 books for the organization of the temple.  Since then, White Cloud Mountain has been famous in Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Gansu Provinces, and in Ningxia and Internal Mongolia autonomous regions.  As a travel and resort place, White Cloud Mountain attracts hundreds of thousand of people each year because of its architecture, religion, and arts.  

               A set of the architecture of White Cloud Mountain consists of many kinds of beautiful architecture that include 54 temples and 99 pavilions, stages, superstructures, and lofts.  The pavilions, stages, superstructures, lofts, and ancestral temples take up a total of 81,000 m² of land.  On the ground level of the scene, you first face a beautiful garden with a natural spring in the middle of it, in which you can wash your life difficulties away and leave them there.  The laddered way was made of 699 stone strips, which are necessary steps for reaching the main scene.  The steep point of it has a slope of 75^o.  When you complete all the ladder stairs, you can look back to see a stern bridge far away with the Yellow River flowing under it.  Most of the architecture is similar to most of Chinese architecture in Beijing or other Chinese resort places.  The special ones are caves for sculptures of Buddhism.  The pavilions, stages, caves, superstructures, lofts, and temples were made of wood, marble, stone, brick, tile, and even concrete because they added some new architecture in 1993 and 1998.  

               White Cloud Mountain’s religion is Taoism; however, they put Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism together as a unity.  Yufen Li was the original sponsor of White Cloud Mountain.  He was a Chinese doctor and a Taoist from Middle-south Mountain in China and good at Chinese medicine.  He had an excellent reputation with his medical work, so that the people in that region called him a “True Person”.  After his death, the people made a sculpture in one of the temples to show their respect to him.  The main god in this set of Taoist temples is ZhenWu Ancestor who is the famous ancestor of Taoism.  There are some caves for Buddhism.  There is also a temple where twelve animals representing the twelve Earthy Branches were used to symbolize the year in which a person is born.  A 60-year cycle used to count time in Chinese history is also there.  The Han-Mongolian temple symbolizes that the people were against wars and hoped to have peace.  In White Cloud Mountain, there are three temples where there are Dou Mu Goddesses, Water Goddess, and five other Goddesses.  White Cloud Mountain is a mix of religious traditions in China.  

               There are arts including sculptures, wall pictures, music, and writings in White Cloud Mountain.  Double dragons play a ball, a golden cock arises, a rhinoceros looks up to the moon, rabbits make herbal medicines, five gods of Buddhism hold on to the animals, carp skips through the dragon’s gate, and eight Taoists go over the sea.  They are all sculptures that were made by local folk artists.  The wall pictures involve pictures of large people, narratives from generation-to-generation, natural beauties, and flowers and grasses.  Some tourists left their writing styles, poems, and pictures in White Cloud Mountain.  White Cloud Mountain is a collection of Chinese arts that are still significant for our generation and offspring.  

                      White Cloud Mountain has a history of approximately 400 years.  It has beautiful views.  The government of Shaanxi province once wrote a regulation to protect it as a natural area in 1957 and it also gave it a name as a Resort of Tourists in 1987.  It has a special festival for a week at the beginning of Chinese April each year.  It has been attracting more and more visitors from inside of China and overseas.            
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