The Second Spring of China

clip image004 thumb2 The Second Spring of ChinaA melodious music "Er Quan Ying Yue", takes you to the national famous tour spot, the Second Spring of China. Here, you can sip a cup of tea made of the spring water, feel the sweet mellow flavor passing by your month, and enjoy the pure, quite ambience soaked with historical sense floating among the sound of water, the epigraph of sites, the tweedle of birds as well as the breeze coming through the trees.

Located by of Huishan Temple, Wuxi, Zhejiang Province, there is a well-known Huishan Spring (formerly known as Yi-Lan Spring) drilled in Tang Dynasty (AD 779) by the magistracy of Wuxi county. Once the famous "Tea Sage", Lu Yu, who wrote the first monograph of tea, recommended after tasting 20 springs that, the water of Lushan Kangwang-dong curtain as the first, and Wuxi Huishan water for Second. Another expert on water taste assessment Liu Bochu said: "There are seven springs having suitable water for tea-making, the first is Ling-Spring in Yangzi River, the second is Huishan Spring". As has been listed the second by Lu and Liu, the two ancient tea experts, Huishan Spring hence had it named "the China’s Second Spring".

The water of Huishan Spring is colorless and transparent, with little minerals. The water has a sweet taste, the quality of which is deemed the first-class of domestic springs. In history, this spring was a venue for poet, literati, and dignitary for enjoyable tea drinking and poem composing. For example, Su Dongpo has left the famous "independently carry the small round moon in the heaven, to test the second spring in the human". Emperor Song Huizong made the spring listed in the tributes, asking for 100 altars per month. Many other Emperors, such as Kangxi and Qianlong, all came to the spring for a drink and left enduring poetries.

clip image002 thumb2 The Second Spring of ChinaHuishan Spring has three pools, the upper, the middle and lower. The upper pool, as the source where water gushes, produces the best water. The surrounding stone balustrades is very smooth except some locations, where balustrades were stepped deep into several gaps, being the traces that people taking spring there in the last millennium. The middle pool is also stone-balustraded, close to the upper one. Above is Erquan Pavilion, placed a tablet with inscription "the second spring of China" by Zhao Mengfu, a great calligrapher of Yuan dynasty there. The lower pool, also the largest one, is drilled in North Song Dynasty, located beneath the Yi Lantang Building.

At every silient, deep nights in Autumn, two bright moons are respectively reflected in the upper and middle pools. The modern folk musician Blind A Bing has once strayed around the Huishan area, composed an enduring works with his lifetime energy. This plaintive song touched all’s hearts, and got widely spread at home with the name of the vivid scene of deep fall night and the springs – “Er Quan Ying Yue” – moon reflection in two pools.

characters thumb1 The Second Spring of China

Learn Chinese Online The Second Spring of China

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>