The Summer Palace

15/10/13

We’re in the middle of October and summer is finally starting to fade. The days are getting darker earlier and there is a definite chill in the air but the weather is still quite pleasant. When we woke up to smog-less blue skies we decided to make a quick trip to the Summer Palace. The Summer Palace was built in 1749, by 100,000 workers on the orders of Emperor Qian-long who actually named it the Garden of Clear Ripples. The site was historically a royal garden but your man Qian had his workers enlarged the gardens and deepened the Kunming Lake. Sadly in 1860, at the end of the Second Opium War, British and French soldiers pillaged the palaces and destroyed many of the temples which was pretty crappy of them. In 1888, Empress Cixi changed the name to The Summer Palace and restored it, only for foreign soldiers to return in 1900 and ruin it again! Talk about unlucky. It seems that the Chinese got fed up of fixing the place up as the palace remained untouched until after the communist takeover in 1949 when work begun to repair it! 

After successfully navigating the subway and finding an entrance, which was quite an achievement as the Chinese seem adverse to signposts, we went straight to Kunming Lake. To be honest, it’s hard to miss as three quarters of the park is water! After a quick walk around the lake we took a walk through the impressive Long Corridor. It stretches 700m and its beams, walls and ceilings are decorated with 14,000 intricate paintings depicting scenes from Chinese history and myths as well as classic literary texts.

 The Long Corridor took us to the foot of Longevity Hill which is basically a hill covered in temples and pavilions. After paying 10RMB (£1) we began the steep climb to the Buddhist Temple of the Sea of Wisdom. It didn’t take long to scale the hill and it was totally worth the entrance fee – the views were fantastic! After taking a few cheeky snaps we stopped off to see the big rubber duck. This not so little ducky is a giant floating sculpture which is currently on a “spreading joy around the world” tour. There are several big ducks and they have been to Taiwan, Azerbaijan, China, the UK, Hong Kong, Australia, Belgium, New Zealand, Japan, Brazil and France so they’re pretty well travelled!

Naturally when we packed to come to Beijing we packed summer clothes and winter clothes. We are talking complete extremes here – I have shorts and I have a ski jacket. There is no in-between. Rory followed my lead and while I have a few cardigans to help me brave the chilly nights, he has nothing. When we left the house it was quite warm but after a few hours the temperature dropped and the wind picked up. Undeterred we pressed on and headed to the Olympic Park and had our first glimpse of the Birds Nest which is actually quite impressive. There was also a football match on, Brazil vs. Zambia and of course Rory, who has been seriously missing the home comfort that is Sky Sports, wanted to go. Unfortunately the risk of death from hypothermia was high so we decided to skip the football. Obviously I was heartbroken... NAT! 

 

 

 

One thing I really like about Beijing is the fact that it is such a diverse city. You can go from skyscrapers to ramshackle hutongs in a matter of feet and nobody seems even slightly fazed. I don’t really know what I expected from China but it was nice to see something “authentically Chinese” in the middle of this huge and extremely modern city. I should probably mention that when I say “authentically Chinese” what I really mean is “something that looks like it was in Mulan” and has a bit of history about it. It was also worth seeing the Birds Nest – it hasn’t been around for long but it’s part of the new and ever developing China. All in all we’ve had another great day in Beijing – a wee bit of the old and a wee bit of the new, lovely.