Masjid Jamek is situated where both rivers the Sungei Klang and the Sungei Gombak meet. Right at this very place has the history of Kuala Lumpur started. This is the very spot for KL's history, where the early settlers built their shacks. In the 1850s, early miners would unload here their equipment and provisions. They would then trek up the jungle path to Ampang, where they would dig for tin. This graceful, onion-domed mosque, designed by British architect Arthur Benison Hubback, borrows Mogul and Moorish styles with its brick-and-plaster banded minarets and three shapely domes. It was built in 1907 and officially opened by the Sultan of Selangor on 23rd of December in 1909. It remained the city's centre of Islamic worship until the opening of the National Mosque in 1965.
The Houhai Bar Street, in the famous Shichahai area of Beijing, is a place where traditional Chinese and western culture hits. When the first bar opened at a common Siheyuan (四合院, quadrangle courtyard) in the area in 2000, there were only approximately a dozen of bars in the Shichahai area. Three years later, a cluster of bars, restaurants and cafes surged in the area within half a year and now over 120 ones welcome visitors from all corners of the world every evening.
The Yonghe Temple is a glittering attraction in Beijing Buddhist firmament. It's the place where riveting roofs, fabulous frescoes, magnificent decorative arches, tapestries, eye-popping carpentry, Tibetan prayer wheels, tantric statues and a superb pair of Chinese lions mingle with dense clouds of incense. However, the pinnacle of the complex is inside the fifth hall: a magnificent 18m-high statue of the Maitreya Buddha, a messianic Buddhist figure, in his Tibetan form, clothed in yellow satin and reputedly sculpted from a single block of sandalwood.
