Yellow Crane Tower
Yellow Crane Tower, located on Snake Hill in Wuchang, is one of the "Three Famous Towers South of Yangtze River (the other two: Yueyang Tower in Hunan and Tengwang Tower in Jiangxi).
Legend goes that here used to be a wine-shop opened by a young man surnamed Xin. One day, a Taoist priest, in order to thank the man for his favor of free wine, drew a magic crane on the wall and told it to dance on hearing claps. Since then, thousands of people came to see the spectacle and the wine shop was always full of guests. After 10 years, when the Taoist priest's revisit the wine shop, he played the flute and then rode on the crane to the sky. In order to memorize the supernatural encounter and the priest, the Xins built a tower here named Yellow Crane Tower.
According to records, the tower was first built in 223 A.D during the Three Kingdoms period (220-280). After completion, the tower once served as a gathering place for celebrities and poets to make merry and compose poetry. It was estimated that up to the Tongzhi Reign of the Qing dynasty, as many as 300 poems about the tower had been found in the historical literature, in which "Yellow Crane Tower" wrote by Cui Hao, a famous poet of Tang dynasty (618-907) made the tower well known throughout China.
Destroyed many times in successive dynasties, the tower was rebuilt time and again until 100 years ago when it was for the last time reduced to ashes. The present tower is the result of four years of construction beginning in 1981. The tower, 51.4 meters high, is five-storied with yellow tiles and red pillars, overlapping ridges and interlocking eaves, more magnificent than the old one. The ground floor of the new is 20 meters wide in each side and the old tower is only 15 meters wide. Therefore we can say that Yellow Crane Tower has been reconstructed instead of being renovated.
Now, the tower has already been regarded as the symbol of Wuhan city.
Notes:
1. Yellow Crane Tower 黄鹤楼
2. Three Kingdoms Period 三国时期
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