Guilin Inspired Poetry 桂林带给人家寫作的靈感

In our trip to Guilin we had a wonderful experience, the opportunity to visit the campus of the old Guangxi Teachers University 廣西師範大學. Unlike some areas on the Pacific Rim, with the fault lines, volcanoes and soft new mountains, Guilin has very old and hard granite mountains. They are not really high, but they are high enough and very steep. They can rise up almost anywhere in the city. In fact, mountains rise sharply right out of this campus, sort of a 世外桃園 feeling.

There is a mountain that we climbed up right toward the back of the campus 校園的後面. You can see the view from part of the way up in the photo here. It was very steep 陡峭 but there were steps and as you can see the view was definitely worth it 值得. Naturally, all of this beauty inspired poetry. Scholars from other parts of China have been coming here for more than 1200 years ago in the Tang Dynasty and carved poems into the rock waxing eloquent about their surroundings. Not too different from the writers 作者 and artists 藝術家 that seek out spots of natural beauty today for inspiration to live and work. That is one of the things I really love about China is the combination of a long history and nature together in many spots.