World on my postcards

  Kuan Yin, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, is a fixture of the Chinese Buddhist tradition. There are two stories to tell about her: 1. The story suggest that the most commonly recognized Buddha, Sidhartha Gauthama, transformed himself into the female form of Kuan Yin. 2. According to the Chinese legend, she forgo her privilege to enter eternal bliss after having attained Nirvana and chose instead to stay back and help lost souls in the world of suffering. Her sacrifice was worshipped to this very day... The bronze statue is 30,2 meter tall. The statue was ready in 1999, when I visited the complex for the first time. It's open to the public since  2002. The statue stands all day long in the burning sun, and if it ours, the rain will drop heavily on her. So they made a proposition to build a roof above her head. To finance this roof you can donate a roof tile. 

 Khoo Kongsi is a large Chinese clanhouse. It is very famous as it is the grandest clan temple not in Penang, but the country of Malysia. It was built 100 years ago. It's historic setting and architecture is what attracts the crowds of tourists. This clan temple is the setting that marks the first period of entry of the Chinese to Malaysia. There is a large courtyard, facing the clan temple. This is the venue of the popular and historic Chinese Opera. This event is normally held around one of the grandest festive season celebrated, the Chinese New Year. There is a museum installed on the ground floor from the recent renovation. P.S. I love pandas^_^

The 1,600 Pandas World Tour started in 2008 as a collaboration between WWF and Paulo Grangeon, an enthusiastic French sculptor who created the 1,600 papier mache pandas. With over 30 years of experience in his craft, Grangeon created the pandas in various poses, emotions and sizes using recycled paper, as a symbolic representation of the amount of pandas left in the wild. The tour has appeared in more than 100 exhibitions across various countries such as France, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

 Penang  is an island off the northwestern coast of Peninsular Malaysia. It is also the name of the Malaysian state which is made up of Penang Island and the facing strip of territory on the mainland called Seberang Perai (formerly Province Wellesley). Penang is also well known for being the "food paradise" of Malaysia. A sprawling hillside structure that is reputed to be the largest Buddhist temple in South-East Asia, with the Khmer/Thai/Chinese style Ban Po Thar (Ten Thousand Buddhas Tower) and various Buddha images in the main temple complex. During the Chinese New Year period, the temple is decorated with hundreds of lanterns which turns it into a night-time wonderland .

 Sabah’s rich cultural heritage can be seen through its wide array of traditional costumes, representing the respective tribes and districts.From magnificent tribal head-feathers with bark body-covers to antique gold-woven royal songket fabric, the array traditional costumes and textiles are stunningly diverse and colourful.

Borneo is a huge island located in South-East Asia , in between the Indian & Pacific oceans.The Borneo rainforest is certainly the largest, and the most important, forested land-area in Asia. The forest itself is estimated to be, extraordinarily, around 130 million years old , and is presumably older than the Amazon rainforest.