Located at the foot of the Taishi Mountain, a major part of Mount Songshan, 3 kilometers north of Dengfeng town and 80 kilometers to the southwest of Zhengzhou, Songyang Academy is one of the major 4 academies of the Song Dynasty, the others being Yingtian in Suizhou, Henan Province, Yuelu in Hunan Province and Bailudong in Jiangxi Province. Famous Confucian scholars such as Sima Guang, Fan Zhongyan, Zhu Xi and Cheng Hao used to give lectures here. Now in an area of more than 10,000 square meters, there exist 100 rooms and over 70 steles kept in the stele corridor. In the courtyard are two primitive cypresses, Emperor Wui of the Western Han Dynasty praised them as "Generals." The Great General has a biggest tunk perimeter of 6 meters and a height of about 15 meters, while the Second General has a perimeter of some 12 meters and a height of about 20 meters. The cypresses were already big enough when they were offered the titles of honor 2,000 years ago, now they boast the oldest and biggest existing trees of the kind in China. Outside the yard stands a huge tablet of the Tang Dynasty, now the biggest in Henan, as tall as 8 meters.
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