While walking around the Kunming Expo Garden on a recent Sunday, we rode a small gondola up to a park surrounding an ancient temple.
The trails surrounding the temple were nicely gardened with azaleas:
The main attraction of the park is the Golden Temple, built over 300 years ago during the Ming Dynasty:
En-route to the temple, you encounter a number of interesting brass sculptures:
On a mountain peak near the temple is a bell tower containing this huge bell (14 tons), cast in the Yongle era (1424):
From this bell tower, you can also get a good view of our city in the distance:
The view would actually be better, but our fair city is falling prey to the air pollution which has accompanied rapid urbanization all over China. We now have the luxury of either looking out the window or checking the internet to evaluate the air quality, both of which can be a bit disturbing:
haha, at first I didn’t notice dad’s head poking up from behind the bulls statue!
Surprised on the air pollution… thought Kunming was the refuge in the mountains from all the haze of the plains! There was an interesting article in the NYT recently about how people migrating up to Lijang + Dali to get away from the pollution.
Watch out for your lungs.
Since we moved to Kunming three years ago, the air quality has rapidly deteriorated. All around us, old buildings are being reduced to dust. Hundreds of new apartment units are being constructed from materials delivered by thousands of trucks belching high-sulfur fumes into our formerly clean air. Look out Dali and Lijiang!!!