Linggui Park locates in Gaoming District, Foshan. It covers an area of 1,000 acres, which is close to the Xijiang River with beautiful natural scenery. Linggui Park was listed as the Provincial Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit.
Legend about Linggui Park
According to legends, in the ancient times, there were many venomous snakes, scorpions, malaria, rats and poisonous insects in the Xijiang area, which caused the locals suffering miserably. People prayed for day and night and finally the magic turtle was moved by their sincerity. The turtle exerted its mana and exorcised evil. From then on, the town had favorable weather in a good harvest and people lived peacefully.
However, the turtle crept along Xijiang River exhausted and then turned into a mountain, resembling a turtle. Thus the mountain was called as Guifeng Mountain. The power of the turtle is always praised and worshipped by people.
Main attractions in Linggui Park
The Linggui Pagoda was built on Guifeng Mountain, which is also called as Guifeng Pagoda. In 1601 of Ming Dynasty, the local villagers organized to build this pagoda in memory of the turtle, which becomes a navigation mark of Xijiang River.
The octagonal Linggui Pagoda has seven floors, which is made of bricks. It is 32.3 meters high, with a diameter of 7.2 meters. The pagoda was originally made of wooden planks but changed to the brick structure during the reconstruction later. The cornices of each floor are decorated with glazed tiles. There used to be two stone Buddha statues on the first floor but got lost for centuries.
Linggui Pagoda was destroyed by lightning and floods in the past three hundred years. During the Anti- Japanese War, it was shelled and shot, nearly collapsed. In 1984, the local government allocated relevant funds to rebuild this ancient pagoda. Standing on the pagoda, overlooking the beautiful Xiqiao Mountain and the vast Xijiang River, it is quite refreshing and exhilarating.
Founded in May 2002, Century Coin Museum also locates in Linggui Park. It is the patriotic education base in Foshan, which is the only private professional coin museum open to the public in Guangdong Province. The museum contains tens of thousands of the currencies from Xia, Shang dynasties to modern China, which are exhibited based on the time. Many of them are quite rare and precious in China and even in the world. The currencies in the museum formed complete historical and cultural records of the Chinese currency.