Beijing travel tips and stories. Vacations ideas, cruises spa and resorts

Valencia
All eyes will be on Valencia later this year when the Spanish city hosts the coveted America’s Cup, the world’s biggest and most prestigious yachting event. Valencia is the first city in Europe to stage the race, despite the event’s long history. Already a popular short break destination with savvy travellers, Valencia benefits from a great location a short hop from the resorts on the Costa Blanca and is well served by no-frills airlines. But it is a charming city in its own right, home to the original paella, and it offers an exciting mixture of old and new, with cutting edge modern architecture and traditional baroque barrios. Check out the futuristic looking Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias (the City of Arts and Sciences) designed by local architect Santiago Calatrava, featuring Europe’s largest state-of-the-art marine park, complete with a 30m- (98ft-) long shark tunnel, a dolphinarium, huge fish tanks, a colony of Humboldt’s penguins, and a very surreal underwater restaurant . The harbour area, Europe’s largest urban regeneration project, will be at the centre of the action during the Cup.

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Potala Palace located at Lhasa is one of the most massive palace on the Earth. Now a museum it was once the winter religious and political seat of Tibet under the leadership of the Dalai Lama.

Built at an altitude of 3,700 m, on the side of Marpo Ri hill, the Red Mountain in the center of Lhasa Valley, Potala Palace, with its vast inward-sloping walls broken only in the upper parts by straight rows of many windows, and its flat roofs at various levels, is not unlike a fortress in appearance. At the south base of the rock is a large space enclosed by walls and gates, with great porticos on the inner side. A series of tolerably easy staircases, broken by intervals of gentle ascent, leads to the summit of the rock. The whole width of this is occupied by the palace.

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The Forbidden City ( aka Forbidden Palace ) is located at the exact center of the ancient city of Beijing, China. It was the imperial palace during the mid-Ming and the Qing Dynasties. The Forbidden City now is known as the Palace Museum and its extensive grounds cover 720,000 square meters, and at one time supposedly had 800 buildings and more than 8,000 rooms, though there are only 2,172 rooms that remain intact. As such, it is listed by UNESCO as the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures in the world, and was declared a World Heritage Site in 1977 as the “Imperial Palace of the Ming and Qing Dynasties”. The Imperial Palace Grounds are located directly to the north of Tiananmen Square and are accessible from the square via Tiananmen Gate. It is surrounded by a large area called the Imperial City.

Construction of the palace complex began in 1407, the 5th year of the Yongle reign of the third emperor of the Ming dynasty. It was completed fourteen years later in 1420. It was said that a million workers including one hundred thousand artisans were driven into the long-term hard labor. Stone needed was quarried from Fangshan, a suburb of Beijing. It was said a well was dug every fifty meters along the road in order to pour water onto the road in winter to slide huge stones on ice into the city. Huge amounts of timber and other materials were freighted from faraway provinces. Ancient Chinese people displayed their very considerable skills in building the Forbidden City. Take the grand red city wall for example. It has an 8.6 meters wide base reducing to 6.66 meters wide at the top. The angular shape of the wall totally frustrates attempts to climb it. The bricks were made from white lime and glutinous rice while the cement is made from glutinous rice and egg whites. These incredible materials make the wall extraordinarily strong.

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The Great Wall of China is really one masterpiece of human power and construction. Just like a gigantic dragon, the Great Wall winds up and down across deserts, grasslands, mountains and plateaus stretching approximately 6,700 kilometers (4,163 miles ) from east to west of China. With a history of more than 2000 years, some of the section of the great wall are now in ruins or even entirely disappeared. However, it is still one of the most appealing attractions all around the world owing to its architectural grandeur and historical significance.

Today, it is the travel icon of China – and one of the leading vacation travel destinations in the world.

The Great Wall was originally built in the Spring, Autumn, and Warring States Periods as a defensive fortification by the three states: Yan, Zhao and Qin. The Great Wall went through constant extensions and repairs in later dynasties. In fact, it began as independent walls for different states when it was first built, and did not become the “Great” wall until the Qin Dynasty. Emperor Qin Shihuang succeeded in his effort to have the walls joined together to fend off the invasions from the Huns in the north after the unification of China. Since then, the Great Wall has served as a monument of the Chinese nation throughout history. A visit to the Great Wall is like a tour through the history backwards, it will bring you great excitement in each step of the wall.

The construction of the Great Wall began between the 7th and 8th centuries B.C. when the warring states built defensive walls to ward off enemies from the north. It was only a regional project then. Until the Qin Dynasty, the separate walls were joint together and consequently it stretched from east to west for about 5000 thousand kilometers and served to keep nomadic tribes out. The Wall was further extended and strengthened in the succeeding dynasties. Especially during the Ming dynasty when the northern nomadic ethnic groups became very powerful, the Ming rulers had the Wall renovated 18 times. As a result, not the remains from the Qin dynasty were restored, but some 1000 kilometers were constructed to a full length of 6,700 kilometers.

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