Summer Palace

Our trip to the Summer Palace was...meh. Notice I said our trip was meh, and not the Summer Palace itself. (Its Chinese name means 'Garden of Nurtured Harmony.' How can that be meh?)

First off, it was incredibly hazy. I guess Beijing has a lot of smog, but geez.




Second, there were too many people there, so we had to stick with the group the entire time. I think we spent more time in the painting shop (not quite a factory, but close enough) than walking around. So that was lame. It's too bad, because I imagine it can be quite peaceful there. One of our friends who went on a similar tour in August said the Summer Palace was her favorite site (except for the Great Wall, which everyone loves, of course).

The story behind the Summer Palace is really interesting. It's where the emperor and his entourage used to go to escape the heat of summer (the rest of the year they lived in the Forbidden City). The palace was destroyed, and then restored in the late 1800s by the Empress Dowager Cixi, the original dragon lady. She took money earmarked for moderinizing the navy and used it to restore the Summer Palace instead. Instead of building real boats, she rebuilt the marble boat pavillion (and the rest of the buildings as well).

Not as practical as a real boat (or functional navy), but hey, it's pretty.

You can see the influence of contact with the West in the restoration...the decorations on the boat and other paintings on the various structures seemed a lot more like late-1800s England (or thereabouts--it's not like I'm an expert or anything) than the traditional Chinese design we'd seen elsewhere.

And that ended our last day of the tour. We were both tired of being on a tour. I can see doing a one-day tour, but three days were way too long for us. It was all worth it though, for our free day--for me, it was the best day of the trip.