【Dec】All-Inclusive 2-Day Kaifeng Culture & Historical Tour

With a history of over 2,700 years, Kaifeng is a city with great historic and cultural significance being the most important metropolis in the world at the peak of its glory. It is famous for being one of the seven ancient capitals of China. From setting the precedent for education and science to introducing several new styles of calligraphy, the contribution of Kaifeng to the development and cultural heritage and of China cannot be underestimated.

ITINERARY

Qingming Riverside Landscape Park

Dragon Pavilion - Grand Xiangguo Monaster 

- Kaifeng Iron Pagoda - Back to Beijing

BASIC CONTENT

📆Date of the event:

Phase 1:December 7-8

Phase 2:December 21-22

⏰Where do we meet?

【Saturday】6:00am 

Beijing West Railway Station

*The customer service staff will communicate with you about the specific time and train station

💰Trip fee：

Normal Price：1650RMB

👑VIP Price：1600RMB

💎Diamond VIP：1550RMB

* We will collect 1000RMB as deposit when you sign up. And the rest fee is to be paid 7 days before departure.

-How to become VIP of FCN-

👉 Scenery tickets to all the senic spots

· Dragon Pavilion Park-35RMB

· Qingming Riverside Landscape Park-120RMB

· Grand Xiangguo Monaster-40RMB

· Kaifeng Iron Pagoda-30RMB

👉 Personal Expenses: Expenses of a purely personal nature such as laundry, drinks, fax, telephone call, optional activities, sightseeing or meals which are not included in the itinerary.

👉 Single room supplement

👉 Recommended optional activities

👉 Insurance coverage of personal loss, illness or damages incurred during your trip.

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🏞️ Qingming Riverside Landscape Park

Qingming Riverside Landscape Garden is a grand cultural garden located on the west bank of Dragon Pavilion Lake in Kaifeng city, Henan Province. The garden consists of several complexes which are re-creations based on the painting, Riverside Scene at the Qingming Festival.

The huge painting is a masterpiece of Zhang Zeduan who is a famous painter in the Song Dynasty.It vividly portrays the prosperous scene of the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty, the present Kaifeng. The painting is now kept in the Forbidden City Museum of Beijing.

In the garden, you can boat in the Bian River, pass through the winding bridges and streets, climb the city walls and enjoy the folk acrobatics, such as shadow play and cock-fighting... all of this will make you feel that you are lost in a dream and going back to the Song Dynasty, more than 1000 years ago.

The imperial garden of the park 

All the palaces and gardens have been carefully arranged. Standing inside the gardens and visible from outside, are the pavilion and the pagoda while in the distance a waterfall comes into view. Among these a majestic pavilion will draw our attention, which is named of Fuyun (whisking the cloud) Pavilion.

It was also the place where important royal documents and traditional Chinese painting and books are stored during the Song Dynasty.

Rainbow Bridge

Another scenic spot called Rainbow Bridge is a well-known feature in the Park. It is a replica of one ) of the ten ancient timber bridges. The bridge is 5 meters high. Four columns replicate the poles that were weather vanes at the time of the Song Dynasty. A white crane sits on a disk at the top of each column and they turn to face into the wind, indicating its direction.

Colorful performances

At each end of the Rainbow Bridge you will find many performances about folk custom. On the streets you can find acrobats, puppet shows, cockfighting and even a marriage scene. While in the park you will have the opportunity to see exhibits of folk customs and traditional crafts ranging from hand embroidery and displays of woodcut pictures and official porcelain and so on.

One of the distinctive things you will encounter when visiting the Park lies in participation. You can play a role in a traditional Chinese marriage or be a Number One Scholar in the imperial examinations of ancient times.

🏞️ Dragon Pavilion Park

1. As it is built on a 13-meter high pedestal on a large scale, you can have a bird-view of Kaifeng old town boarding to the top of it.
2. There is a wax work museum themed with the Song Dynasty. And you can watch historical play which is set Song Dynasty as background with every day.
3.Every year during October and November, the park will host a chrysanthemum flower festival in large scale, when you will be able to see various Chrysanthemum flowers.

Located in central area of Kaifeng city (One of top six ancient cities in China), Henan Province, China, Dragon Pavilion Park was first the former mansion of a mission of the Tang Dynasty. Later it turned into an imperial palace in the later Liang Dynasty, Later Jin, Later Han and Later Zhou periods. In the Song Dynasty, an imperial court including imperial palace was built here and called royal residence. Owing to the overrun of the Yellow River, all the buildings constructed in the previous historical periods were underwater. In 1734 in the Qing Dynasty, provincial governor Wang Shijun built the large-scale Longevity Palace here. The park covers an area of about 83 hectares, being the largest tourist area in Kaifeng.

The palace was also known as the Dragon Pavilion for it housed memorial tablet of the Yellow Emperor. Its main building is the present Dragon Pavilion Hall, with two lakes in front, one was called family Pan and the other family Yang. Climbing up to the Dragon Pavilion, tourist will have a good view of Kaifeng city. Main Attractions to See in the Park

🏞️ Grand Xiangguo Monaster

Xiangguo Monastery is a national AAAA tourist spot and one of the ten famous monasteries and temples in China. It was originally built in 555 AD during the Northern Qi Dynasty; it has a history of over 1,400 years. In the Northern Song Dynasty, the monastery was enlarged many times and became the largest monastery and the national Buddhist center at that time.

During the Northern Song Dynasty, it was deeply worshipped and respected by the royal family enlarging for several times, it once occupied an area as large as 500 mu of land, with 64 meditation yards, law yards under its administration, with more than 1,000 monks, being the biggest monastery in the capital city and the center of national Buddhist activities.

At present, the existing structures of the monastery are the Grand Hall (the Mahavira Hall), the Octagonal Hall, the East and West chambers, Great King Hall, Depository of Buddhist Sutras and other buildings. Most of the existing buildings you can see now are rebuilt in recent years, but the scale of the temple has narrowed down compared with its previous look.

📍Kaifeng Iron Pagoda

Located in the Iron Pagoda Park in the northeast part of the Kaifeng City, the Iron Pagoda is called as the First Pagoda under Heaven by people for its exquisite architectural design and magnificent structure.

The pagoda was built in 1049 during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127). With a history of more than nine hundred years, it is one of the earliest constructions made of glazed bricks and tiles in China. It got its name from the iron-gray color of its glazed bricks. Its predecessor was a wood pagoda built by Yu Hao, a noted architect in the Northern Song Dynasty, to worship Buddhist relics of Sakyamuni. The wood pagoda was burnt down in a fire caused by lightning in 1044. Song Emperor Renzong ordered to build an iron pagoda in Yishan Mountain, close to the wood pagoda according to its style. This is the iron-gray pagoda we see today.

The octagonal pagoda is 56.88 meters high and has thirteen levels, with its base buried in silt from the Yellow River. Although it was constructed of glazed bricks of different shapes and sizes, it looks very much like a huge wooden pillar, with carved patterns of Buddhas, flowers, human figures and legendary animals, all representing the highly developed workmanship of the Song Dynasty. The top of the pagoda affords a good view of the whole city of Kaifeng. Hanging under the eaves are 104 bells, giving wonderful tinkles in the breezes. There are 168 steps, winding upwards along the central pillar, by which the visitors can reach the summit of the pagoda.

Historical records show that the pagoda experienced 38 earthquakes, 10 hailstones, 19 disasters caused by windstorms and 6 floods. Especially, it suffered bombings by Japanese planes and cannons in 1938. However, it has stood for over 900 years and remains intact.

About one hundred meters west of the Iron Pagoda is a grand hall with lacquered ridgepoles and painted girders. The hall, with 24 big poles supporting it, is the largest hall in the Iron Pagoda Park, also called the Welcoming Buddha Hall. The figure of Buddha in the hall is 5.14 meters high and weighs 12 tons. The Buddhist figure made of copper, has eleemosynary appearance and heavenly manner with its left hand on the heart and right hand drooping. It stands barefoot on a lotus flower platform and seems ready to guide Buddhists, who have cultivated themselves according to religious doctrines, to the western Elysium. The walls around the Buddhist figure are painted with a large-scale muralThe Western Elysium, on which there are 70 josses including Bodhisattva, fairies, Flying Apsaras, and so on.

On the east of the Iron Pagoda is the site of a Buddhism Institute established in the 1930s, which consists of a display room for cultural relics of the Iron Pagoda and a pavilion to commemorate Yu Hao.

In the Iron Pagoda Park, a lake, a corridor over the water, waterside pavilions, man-made rockeries and springs were constructed in recent years, to entertain the tourists.

Gulou Night Market

Kaifeng night market, situated at Gulou square,Kaifeng’s bustling night market wraps around the Drum Tower， is the must-go street food place at night. There are Kaifeng-style Xiaolongbao, lamb soup, fried yogurt… Countless choices of food! Savoring the delicious food, standing at the foot of the extraordinary Drum Tower built 1000 years ago and enjoying the Chinese opera, you’ll feel like walking back to the prosperity of China’s ancient Song Dynasty.

Citizens and tourists taste snacks at the night market in Gulou square in Kaifeng, central China’s Henan Province, July 9, 2014. Night-market snacks at Gulou square have become the iconic brand of Kaifeng catering culture with reconstruction of Gulou and standard management of Kaifeng snacks. There is veritable hodgepodge of stalls, with non-food offerings ranging from jeans and children’s toys to on-the-spot tattoos and nail art.

🍜 Kaifeng Cuisine

The cooking culture of Kaifeng may well be rich and colorful, there is sediment of the cooking culture of Jin and Yuan dynasty through the ages, there are wild games of local characteristic delicacy from mountain too, there are results from modern plural cultural exchanges, these form Kaifeng unique food and beverage culture, i.e. Kaifeng flavor, its characteristic can summarize as "dialyse, produce beautiful in being sincere, hit the quintessence of containing roughly". Futai floor, Beilaishun, Western food restaurant of Huamei, Jiang NanChun, Sigma restaurant, Fucheng beef in hot pots hot pot city, one dumpling hall, eastern dumpling king, Wu ji sauced bone stew restaurant ,etc. the famous special restaurant of Kaifeng always.

👇 For One-day Tour

👇 For Long-term activities for two days or more

Please let us know immediately if your plans change!

Due to the particularity of some tourist resources which need to be booked in advance and cause actual losses, the specific losses include but are not limited to train tickets, air tickets, hotels, etc. If tourists need to cancel their orders, they should contact FCN in time to assist tourists in reducing losses and refund other losses that have not actually occurred in accordance with the principle of refund. 

In the rare event that FCN cancels a trip, or we are unable to serve you, all fees are immediately refunded, including the deposit.