MARCO POLO BRIDGE
In Chinese, Lugouqiao means «bridge above the roar gap».
History
Marco Polo discovered the site during his visit to the Yuan court in 1276. The detailed description (Marco Polo has only misled the number of arches: twenty-four instead of the existing eleven) of this book of art in its travel books aroused the interest of the contemporaries of the great man, and by reference Marco Polo became the name of use in the West to designate the bridge. The structure of 266.50 meters in length is constructed of blocks of white stone, with the marble rambars of the deck aligning a continuous succession of 485 lions cut in stone. The original book of 1192 was carried by a flood in the seventeenth century. Under the Jin (1190-1208), the bridge was inscribed among the eight most beautiful sites of Yanjing (Beijing) under the reference "Moon at Dusk on the Lugou Bridge" (Lugou Xiaoyue). In 1751, Emperor Qianlong published the descriptions of the eight most beautiful sites in Beijing and gravitated a stack that was placed at the foot of the bridge (still standing today).
It was on this bridge that one of the most violent conflicts in the beginning of the century was: the war against the Japanese on July 7, 1937, also known as the «Marco Polo Bridge Incident». And that's why the entire site is now classified and protected as a national monument by the Chinese government.
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