CAPTURE NEW HORIZONS

At the northern edge of the old district, on Xijing Street, is  Kezhi Yuan (Kezhi Gardens) . This was our second stop on the tour of Zhujiajiao.  The name Kezhi is made up of the characters 课 (kè) which means "to learn" and 植 (zhí) which means "to plant". It consists of three parts - the main hall, the garden and an artificial hill area. The most iconic landmark of the gardens is a five story building with a pavilion on its roof - the tallest structure in old Zhujiajiao.  T he history of this garden dates back to 1912, when Ma Wenqing built it, drawing inspiration from a mixture of Chinese and European influences. The construction took 15 years and 300 000 silver taels, equivalent to 12000 kg of silver.  The wars and revolutions of the following half century brought much destruction to the garden and its buildings, and in 1956 additional old structures where torn down to make room for teaching buildings of the Zhujiajiao Middle School that had come to...

The Seven Treasures town is another ancient village outside Shanghai and was one of the stops we made on our tour last Monday before heading to the airport to catch the plane home back to Scotland.  During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the Seven Treasures became a prosperous marketplace, known for its cloth, yarn, carpentry, rice wine and water. Today the variety of shops of the three narrow and bustling streets are still part of the Shanghai shopping scene and a honey pot for tourists as well. The streets are intersected by a series of water ways with footbridges spanning the main canal every few hundred metres. Walking around with the X-T1 and the three Fujinon zoom lenses I was able to capture a flavour of the Seven Treasures town but not the smells that emanated from food shops at every turn.  It was certainly different!  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------...