The Yueyaquan (月牙泉 / the Crescent Moon Spring)

As usual, I post articles after I did a new model onto this blog every Monday or Tuesday. But there is no new model I want to talk about at all this week.

Last week, a friend from Canada, inspired me an idea to talk about my models in English. So that many of the stories can be read easily by non-Chinese.

Anyway, here the model I'll introduce is, Yueyaqian, or the Crescent Moon Spring I've modeled in 2010.

I choose the buildings for model creating is just they are special buildings in special location. The Crescent Moon Spring is a kind of geological wonder which is located in Dunhuang, Gansu, China. It owes its name to the shape of the spring. See the following photo by Google Earth.

In fact, the spring you can see in the photo is a pond which is in front of the Buildings I modeled. The pond is fed by spring water. Currently, the pond is about 200m long, and 50m wide.


A thousand years ago the Spring was a source of pure and sweet water and the length of it was about 300m! People used to be able to ride a boat there but as the country developed and towns/villages used more and more water, set up water wells and stuff, the water level decreased in the spring.  Now it's about 200m long!!! and about 50m wide :( also the water is not pure anymore and you should not drink from it. 

Surrounding the pond are the sand dunes. The Chinese call the dune in front of the pond and buildings as Ming Sha Mountain. Ming Sha Mountain owes its name by hill of singing sands or echoing sands when the sounds make by the sands as the winds sweep the sands across the desert.

To see more information about the spring, dunes, and the buildings, try to use the keyword
"Crescent Moon Spring". You will get more about them.

The buildings, in fact, are totally new buildings. The old one was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Than the CCP government built them in Tang style for Sightseeing around 1990's.

   

I wrote an article in Chinese.  read more, if you were interesting in more about my Crescent Moon Spring model.

*Thanks a lot for Elaine with her great help to this article.