The Meilin Lake, Chao'an (Pictorial)

The Meilin Lake is not, unfortunately, listed as one of the highlight’s on China's awe inspiring tourist trail. Although a very serene and beautiful sanctuary, it hardly competes with the many mind blowing destinations and relics of the past that litter the Chinese empire. However, it seems to have captured the imagination of quite a few tourists, mainly mainland Chinese, who have made the effort to go there. It lies in the heart of Teochew country in Chao'an, between the cities of Chaozhou and Shantou. To give a better idea a collection of images captured on their smartphones recently is presented below. The sunset, looking from the eastern shore, a place where Tan most likely spent some of his early childhood, looking across the lake to the distant hills in the west seems to be a favorite "photo opp".









Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Mystery and Mastery of Tan Yeok Nee (Part 1)

Image
Introduction: The Life and Times of Tan Yeok Nee Tan Yeok Nee is a towering figure in the history of 19th-century Johor and Singapore. He started out as a youthful immigrant from China, enduring indentured labour on his arrival in Pahang. He eventually became one of the most powerful men in Johor and Singapore during the 1860s-1880s. Today he has streets named after him in Johor Bahru and buildings that bear his name in Singapore. More fundamentally, however, we see everyday the successful economies of Johor and Singapore and the ever improving livelihoods of their inhabitants. Although he played a major, and foundational, role in creating this phenomenon, relatively little is known about him. This is the first post I have published in some months in the on-going story about the writing of  Palace of Ghosts . The reason for the break is that when I first had the idea to include a post on Tan Yeok Nee, who is an important yet secondary character in Palace of Ghosts, I imagined that the
Read more

The Mystery and Mastery of Tan Yeok Nee (Part 2)

Image
Fresh off the Boat: New Friends in Singapore When the youthful Tan Yeok Nee first befriended Abu Bakar at his father’s residential compound at Telok Blangah in Singapore, neither of them could have known how transformational the friendship and, later on, the partnership would become. Those days were, however, still a long way off when Tan first stepped off the boat and onto the shores of Malaya and Singapore. Among immigration societies like Hong Kong and Singapore, there so often appears to be an inverse relationship embedded in the origin stories of how staggering wealth sprouted from humble beginnings: the more successful a tycoon eventually became, the more desperately eccentric his debut in the world of business seemed to be. Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing starting out as a street vendor of plastic flowers comes to mind. However, it’s not just unique to immigrants nor to Asia: the 1960s entertainment sketch “The Four Yorkshiremen,” immortalized by England’s Monty Python off-beat comedy t
Read more

The Mystery and Mastery of Tan Yeok Nee (Part 6)

Image
The Flight From Johor    The last post saw Tan Yeok Nee scaling heights of affluence and power that few newly arrived immigrants in the region could have ever dreamt of. Within only a couple of decades Tan had risen from being a door-to-door peddler of fabrics to perhaps the most wealthy and influential figure within the Singapore and Johor business and political elites of the time. All the more perplexing then that in 1875, only four years after his elevation to the highest echelons of power, including leadership of the Great Opium Syndicate, Tan apparently vanished from the Johor scene. It was a supposed disappearing act made all the more mysterious by the lack of any kind of explanation as to why. At least that is how some accounts of the events that transpired would have us believe. The Singapore National Library Board’s Infopedia site says: “In 1875, Tan fled from Johor to Singapore and gave up all his connections in Johor.” Considering Tan’s staggering accumulation of power and w
Read more