My Hometown
...andscape and long history make my hometown an excellent tourism destination. Its most famous sights are the Famen Temple, Taibai Mountain, and the Tiantai Mountain National Forest Park. Famen Temple is considered one of China’s four most important Buddhist temples. It was first built more than 1,700 years ago in the Eastern Han Dynasty, in Famen Town, Fufeng County. The temple was best known during the Tang Dynasty, when Buddhism in China spread most rapidly. Sixteen years ago, while workmen were reinforcing the foundations of one of the temple’s pagodas, an underground palace housing four Sakyamuni relics and more than 2,000 rare cultural relics was discovered. In order to preserve these Buddhist cultural treasures, one year later, the Famen Temple Museum was opened to the public. It now receives ten to twenty thousand visitors every day. In February last year, the Sakyamuni finger bone relic, kept in Baoji’s Famen Temple, was sent to Taiwan for exhibition for four days. Over 300,000 Buddhists came to revere it. The relic has since been designated the ninth wonder of the world by UNESCO, making Baoji a focus of domestic and international attention. Taibai Mountain is another my hometown’s tourist destinations. At about 4,000 meters above sea level, it is the habitat of a variety of flora and fauna. It is a remnant of the Quaternary glacier which still exists in these high mountains, in the form of cirque lakes, fossilized streams, and frozen rock pillars. The mountain summit is snow-capped throughout the year, and warm spring water bubbles from the mouth of the mountain valley. Ten years ago, the Taiwan Mountain National Fore--the highest altitude national forest park tn China, opened to tourists. My hometown--Baoji is also an important industrial and commercial city in western China. Its machinery, electronic and instrument-making and nonferrous metal industries, such as the titanium industry, have brought great benefits to my city. Many of its products, including numerically controlled machine tools, heavy-duty automobiles, and petroleum drilling equipment , are national leaders. A recently built hi-tech industrial z...