China - Luoyang to Shanghai - Day 16
| Stayed | Central Hotel Shanghai (上海王宝和大酒店) | No. 555 Jiujiang Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai (上海黄浦区九江路 555 号) |
| Travel | Flying | Flew from Luoyang to Shanghai |
| Walking | 14.2 km |
It was raining hard in Luoyang. We started with a tour of the old town, which isn’t significantly developed like other cities, but it is lively and very active at night.
Then we drove to the UNESCO Longmen Grottoes. They were commissioned by the same emperor as the Yungang Grottoes, but they felt very different. There were so many tiny niches, and the limestone allowed for more details, but you cannot enter any of them.
The Longmen Grottoes or Longmen Caves feature some of the finest examples of Chinese Buddhist sculptures. In 2000, the site was named a UNESCO World Heritage site for its outstanding manifestation of human artistic creativity. Housing tens of thousands of statues of Buddha, ranging from 1 inch (25 mm) to 57 feet (17 m) in height, the Longmen Caves were mainly carved off a 0.62 mile (1 km) stretch of cliff running along the west bank of the Yihe river. Most of the caves date from the early Tang dynasty (618-907 AD), with some from the Northern Wei dynasty (493-534 AD).
After lunch, we flew to Shanghai. After a quick check-in at our hotel, we walked down the pedestrianised Nanjing Road and onto the Bund on the river, overlooking the Pudong side. It was so different from our trip 30 years ago.
Nicely done.
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