
Sitting at the southern tip of the Liaoning Province, on the Liaodong Peninsula, Dalian is a large but young port city. It is known for its many squares featuring colonial buildings, serviced apartment properties like Somerset Harbour Court Dalian and beaches like Tiger Beach and Golden Pebble Beach. Built by Russians and later a stronghold of the Japanese, today it has a particularly modern European feel. ‘Fashion City’ and ‘Football City’ are two of the nicknames given to the Chinese city of Dalian. Accommodation as well as trading and financial activity have earned it the title ‘Hong Kong of Northern China’
Xinghai Square can be found north of Xinghai Park and Xinghai Bay, in downtown Dalian.
Its total area tops one million square metres and it was built to celebrate the return of Hong Kong from the British. Originally, the site was used as a waste landfill until the government began the land reclamation project in 1993. Xinghai Square was completed on June 30, 1997.
The center of the square takes up forty five thousand square metres and is in the shape of a star. The star design replicates the Heaven Temple’s circular mound altar in Beijing. A large ornamental white marble column rises from the very middle. It is decorated with nine dragons that represent the people of the nine states of ancient China who descended from the dragon.
There is a ‘Wang Tian Hou’ that sits at the top of the column bathed in a golden light. Five smaller white marble columns surround the central column, each with a lamp on top. A set of bronze footprints has been created that start as a young child’s and grow to adult size as they continue. They represent Dalian’s journey. There are several other sculptures of playing children, people at work and artists creating art.
Caleb Falcon is a travel writer who specializes in writing content based on the many exciting world adventures that await intrepid travellers. Google+