Walk-Seeing II - The Summer Palace

A Little Getaway on a Marble Boat
Just between us ancient Chinese royals....we all need a place to relax after a busy week of governing the restless capital of Beijing - dui.ma? (right?)

Well in case you need a place to relax - say 70,000 sqare meters of buildings sitting on a total of 2.9 square kilometers of land. The Summer Palace is just outside of bustling Beijing, its hills overlook the metropolis. There was a time when the Empresses and Emporers would retreat here to escape the heat of Beijing. Now, you can see that the city has grown so much that Beijing is literally right across the water. In fact, while Jacob, me and the Princeton team were walking around the hills and climbing some rocks we could literally see a McDonalds on a street a few blocks away from the frontier of the Palace grounds where we took a rest. In the photo (at left), Ranger Ryan is literally looking out on the street where the McDonalds is located as Jacob-The-Wise consults his guidbook and Jasmine-Tea-Jeanne faces east after having recovered from a triple toe-loop of laughter from Jacob's previous wise cracks.

My no-contest favorite part of the entire Summer Palace...the part that makes it totally worth it to pay for the double priced "through ticket" was our time at the prayer temple for the Empress while at the Summer Palace. We first decided that the name of this tower was much less cool than that of the Sunyunyan Chengguan (Tower of Cloud-Retaining Eaves). But, despite that nomenclatural deficiency (yes, I typed the new word: nomenclatural because it's my party), the Buddhist Incense Tower was the most amazing. The walkways around it were the most beautifully painted halls I've ever seen.

Like everything at the Summer Palace, the 1860s were bad times as the Anglo-French forces burned the whole place to the ground. The drama was The Opium Wars - a period in history in which (especially Brits) were punishing China for not permitting its opium goods to get to Chinese markets. An official in the Cantonese south was concerned about the potential health and spriritual impact of having a country hyped up on dope, however the armies of the pushers would not take no for an answer. The rest is history.


For the record, neither Jacob-the-Wise nor I know half of the characters on the two tablets flanking us in the picture at right. We are both first-semester Chinese students, though Jacob is advanced since he has been living in Beijing.

Ahhh, a long road to go before I can count as high as the 3 year old we heard at the Summer Palace countin each step she took down those daunting stairs from the temple to the ground.