Day 99: Beijing - Summer Palace

Us at Suxhuo Street
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Today we ventured to the outskirts of Beijing to visit the Summer Palace, one of the Emperor’s summer retreats (having another one a whole days travel away too). Huge. It’s setting is a large park (some 716 acres) and scattered around it a numerous temples, courtyards and living accommodations as well as its own 3 storey theatre built for the Dowager Empress Cixi who pretty much took over the palace as her own permanent residence during the near final years of imperial reign. We managed to catch a couple of ‘acts’ involving drumming, dancing and swords (some of which oddly set to music that sounded like Chinese rave).

Dragon at Summer Palace - scary!
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All the temples have odd names when translated from Chinese, lots relating to benevolence & longevity – Hall of Benevolence and Longevity, Hall of Happiness and Longevity, Hall of Increasing Longevity etc. Some of the other buildings are the Pavilion of Harmonising with the Lake, Pavilion of Forgotten Desires & Accompanying Clouds, Realm of the Multitudinous Fragrance, Tower of the Dawn Light and, the less romantically named, Pavilion with Fish & Algae.

Blog of Benevolance

Summer Palace
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We walked along the ‘Long Corridor’ which is a half mile long covered walkway running along the side of Kunming lake. The ceiling and the pillars of the walkway are all painted with different scenes from Chinese history, literature and scenery. The guide book reckons there are roughly 10,000 different scenes in all. It really is incredible.

Walking through the park we managed to find some of the slightly lesser building that have yet to be restored, which in an odd way have even more charm in their faded elegance. We finished at Suxhou Street, a very pretty traditional looking village of shops on a canal like waterfront. Didn’t buy anything but did pass some time window shopping and admiring all the shopkeepers in traditional Qing dynasty outfits.

Jane, cold outside Theatre
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Given its size and possibly the distance out of the centre and the time of day it, thankfully, didn’t seem nearly as busy as the Forbidden City – well worth the £6 taxi fare.

That evening we head out to Hai Hou around the Back Lakes area for dinner as suggested by the hotel concierge as an area with many bars and restaurants. It’s a mass of neon (although quiet nice reflected in the water) and pretty busy. In one concrete park next to the water hundreds of locals seemed to have gathered for some nighttime badminton and hacki sack.