Wu Guanzhong, the master of Chinese painting, has done great contribution to the international promotion of Zhangjiajie. In October, 1979, he was invited to pay a visit to Hunan province to draw a giant landscape painting for the Hunan hall of the Great Hall of the People. In November, he went to Xiangxi for inspiration and he had his visit to Zhangjiajie. He was deeply attracted by the scenery here and drew 5 landscape paintings under tough conditions. The most outstanding one is the ¡°our own axe¡ªZhangjiajie¡±,with a length of 2 meters and height of 1 meter, which has been collected by the Set sager Museum of France. After his visit to Zhangjiajie, he wrote a travel prose ¡°Unkown to the world¡±,which was publish by Hunan Daily on New Year¡¯s Day in 1980. He compared Zhangjiajie as a lost valuable pearl. He wrote: ¡° In order to pursue the beauty of painting, I have been to many famous mountains, however I feel like that the unknown Zhangjaijie is much more beautiful than Yandang Mountain, Wuyi Mountain and so on. The fantastic landscape is as good as Guilin, but the mountains here are much more mysterious, centralized , splendid and tameless . This prose gains a lot of attention and heated feedbacks. After that, Mr Wu spared no efforts to promote Zhangjiajie and made it well known to the world. And then, Zhangjiajie gained the reputation of the first national forest park, the world natural heritage and the global geopark, which has greatly promoted the tourism industry of Zhangjiajie. In 2010, the municipal government of Zhangjiajie built a bronze statue of Wu Guanzhogn in order to commemorate the contribution that Mr Wu had made to Zhangjiajie.
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