BUY
A TICKET?
at
the doorway
you
will have to leave
your
control issues
and
possessiveness
your
idiosyncrasies
and
mood swings
your
petty games
of
yes and no
your
see-saws
of
love and hate
and
mainly,
those
three-petaled clovers
of
'i love you'
'i
love you not'
along
with your shoes
to
enter my world
Great Mosque of Xi'an (Xīān Dà Qīngzhēnsì)
The Great Mosque of Xi'an (Xīān Dà Qīngzhēnsì) is the largest mosque in China. It is also known as the Huajue Mosque (Huàjué Xiàng Qīngzhēnsì) because of its location on Huajue or the Great Eastern Mosque (Dōng Dàsì) because it sits east of another old mosque in the city, Daxuexi Mosque (Dàxuéxí Xiàng Qīngzhēnsì). Previous religious complexes (Tanmingsi and Huihui Wanshansi) stood on the same site, dating to the Tang dynasty (618–907), but the Great Mosque was constructed during the reign of Zhu Yuanzhang (the Hongwu emperor), who founded the Ming dynasty in 1368. He had close relations with the Hui (Chinese Muslims) and wrote wrote a 100-word baizizan (praise) on Islam, Allah, and Muhammad, which he placed in mosques. Further additions were made during the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), which followed Ming. The mosque is a walled complex of five courtyards. Each courtyard contains a central monument, such as a gate, and is lined with greenery as well as subsidiary buildings. Many walls are filled with inscriptions of birds, plants, various objects, and Chinese and Arabic text, sometimes exhibiting a fusion of styles called Sini, referring to Arabic text written in Chinese-influenced script. Stone steles record repairs to the mosque and feature calligraphic works. It houses more than 20 buildings and covers 12,000 square meters. It combines traditional Chinese architectural form with Islamic functionality; for example, whereas traditional Chinese buildings align along a north-south axis in accordance with feng shui, the mosque is directed west towards Mecca while still conforming to the axes of the imperial city. The prayer hall is a monumental timber building, consisting of three conjoined buildings, set one behind the other. It has a turquoise hip roof, raised upon a large stone platform lined with balustrades, painted dougong (wooden brackets), a six-pillared portico, and five doors. Interior ornamentation is centered on the rear qibla wall, which has wooden carvings of floral and calligraphic designs. The first courtyard contains a Qing dynasty monumental gate; the third courtyard, the Shengxinlou (“Examining the Heart Tower”) has a three-story, octagonal pagoda which originally served as the minaret used for the call to prayer; the fourth courtyard houses the prayer hall and the Phoenix Pavilion, a hexagonal gazebo. The second courtyard has two steles featuring scripts of the Song dynasty poet=art historian Mi Fu (1051–1107) [one of the four greatest calligraphers of the Song dynasty and one of the most important representatives of the ‘Southern School’ of landscape painting, for whom writing or calligraphy was intimately connected with the composing of poetry or sketching. Writing and painting were essentially the same art and required a state of excitement and an alertness of mind and spirit which he thought was best achieved through the enjoyment of wine -- an admirer wrote that his brush was like a sharp sword handled skillfully in fight or a bow which could shoot the arrow a thousand li, piercing anything that might be in its way] and the Ming calligrapher-painter-scholar-art theorist Dong Qichang "Xuanzai" (1555–1636), who advocated a new style of individualistic painting that built on and transformed the style of a traditional master; by relating to the ancient master's style, the artist created a place for himself within the tradition by extending and perhaps surpassing the art of the past.
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