The Olympic flame entered the seventh mainland province Sunday, passing through Suzhou and Nantong.To get more
suzhou news, you can visit shine news official website.
A
total of 104 torchbearers ran along part of the 1,400-year-old Grand
Canal, also known as the Beijing-Hangzhou Canal, which flows across
Suzhou, Jiangsu province, in the morning.
Torchbearer,
China's Olympic table tennis gold medalist Li Ju runs with the torch
during the relay in Nantong, Jiangsu province May 25, 2008. [Xinhua]
They
started from the landmark Lion Hill beside the old town, passed through
narrow alleys, over small canals and across the Yuan Dynasty (AD
1271-1368) Midu Bridge in the more than 2,000-year-old city.
"We
want to show a Suzhou that has all the beauty of a water town in the
East and the attractions of a heaven on the earth," said Wang Rong,
Party secretary of Suzhou.
Eleven foreigners and two Hong Kong
residents were also among the 104 torchbearers, as were four world and
four Asian champions. But Shen Fengying, a popular pingtan actress, drew
the loudest cheers when she ran on the streets of the old town.
"I'm
happy to see so many people cheering me, and I believe they're doing so
because they genuinely love the art of pingtan," she said. Pingtan is
the traditional art of story-telling and ballad-singing in the Suzhou
dialect.
The relay in Nantong began on the 32-km-long
Suzhou-Nantong Bridge over the Yangtze River, which connects the two
delta cities, in the afternoon.
Ge Fei, the last of the 104 torchbearers in the city, is a Nantong native and two-time Olympic gold medal winner.
The
highlight on the route was the Haohe Villa, the residence of
industrialist Zhang Jian. He founded Nantong's first modern cotton mills
in 1899, then developed an industrial complex that included flour, oil
and silk reeling mills, a distillery and a machine shop. By 1911, people
had begun calling the city Zhang Jian's Kingdom".
The Wall