Wine Spring Park

The Wine Spring Park located 1.9km east of the Drum Tower, covers an area of 270,000 square meters. It is the only garden in style of the Han Dynasty in the Hexi Corridor. It has a long history of more than 2,000 years. In the garden there are lakes, hills, bridges and a group of sculptures. The whole garden is sheltered under woods of tall, straight and thick ancient trees. There are also pavilions, archways and temples with carved beams and painted rafters. It has always enjoyed the reputation of being lush southern-type fields beyond the Great Wall and a bright pearl on the Gobi Desert. Now it is a scenery of AAAA rated by the State Tourism Administration.

The front gate in the south is the main entrance. The arch over the gateway is built modeled on the imperial palace gate. It has two watchtowers on each side. It is classical, beautiful, elegant and imposing. There are two inscribed boards hang on the gate. One of them says “bright pearl on Gobi Desert”, the other says “famous scenery of spring and lake”. Above the boards there is a relief sculpture of a bull head, carefully covered of granite picked in remote place in Mountain Qiliang.

It is said that in late period of the Ming Dynasty and early period of the Qing Dynasty, the town frequently flooded. They said that it was demons and ghosts who made trouble in here thus built two temples to suppress the devil spirits. One was built on the northwest corner and the other on the southwest corner. The two temples and the drum tower formed a shape of bull head therefore the town had a local name of “town of crouching bull”.

The Wine Spring, a historical site of the Western Han Dynasty, was located in centre of the garden. It is said that in the Western Han Dynasty, Huoqubing, a young general, commanded a mounted troop of less than ten thousand people to fight against Xiongnu (the Huns) of tens of thousands, won a decisive victory. The Emperor was overjoyed on hearing the news, because things were better than he expected. He sent a envoy to bring him three jars of wine to reward him. The general though it was not enough for everybody of the cavalry, thus had the wine poured into a spring and shared it with his men. The story spread like wild fire. Hence the spring was called the Wine Spring and the place was so named when prefecture was first set up in here in Han Dynasty in honor of him for his immortal contributions to the court.

Publishes at : 07-10-27 20:50

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