The Fall season is the ideal time of the year for traveling, so here’s some of our top picks for beautiful places you can’t afford to miss.
The Saihanba National Forest Park in Hebei province. Located in the North of China, it was once part of the imperial hunting ground for emperors of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). The emperors would come here during the summer to avoid the heat. The park covers an area of 94,000 hectares, about twice the size of Yosemite National Park in the US. As the largest national park in north China, Saihanba is dotted with herds of horses across the meadows, with multi-colored mountains as the backdrop.
“This is just so beautiful, it’s like a work of art,” a tourist said.
With an average altitude of 1400 meters, the park is also known as the home of the clouds. It’s other name is the sea of forests, as the park is covered by a vast number of trees.
“80% percent of the park is covered by trees. That’s more than 1 million acres of forest,” Liu Haiying, party secretary of Saihanba National Forest Park said.
Meanwhile, in the city of Qingdao in East China, the 2014 International Horticultural Exposition has been running since April. The event features a colorful array of flower installations during the holidays. The main exhibition hall has held a floral competition, attracting participants from Holland, Belgium, and Germany, as well as contestants from 14 provinces in China. Chrysanthemum is the theme of the event, and visitors are presented with hundreds of varieties of the flower.
The Shanghai Botanical Garden is also treating visitors to a grand spectacle of flowers. A host of creative designs helps boost the beauty of the flowers, and gives visitors a new angle into nature’s beauty.
Chrysanthemums and sweet olives are two major types of flowers in the installations. But they usually don’t bloom at this same time of the year.
“Chrysanthemums usually bloom in November, but we regulated the sun-exposure for the flowers, to enable them to bloom at the same time as the sweet olive, which is during the national day holidays,” Wang Yuqing, senior architect of Shanghai Botanical Garden said.
The two types of flowers symbolize blessings and good fortune in Chinese culture. And no doubt it is a blessing for tourists traveling across China, that there are so many stunning sites of natural beauty in the country.
