The Summer Palace

This week is one of three "Golden Weeks" the Chinese government implemented a few years ago to encourage tourism. This one centers around the National Holiday (and also around the Mid-Autumn Festival this year), while the other two occur around the New Year and International Labor Day. Anyhow, almost the entire country has the week off, which means that travelling during this time is insane. However, at the urging of my students, I decided to travel anyhow. Two days before the holidays began, I was able to book a flight to Beijing, where a friend of mine, Phil (The Storey Story), is studying for the semester. While there were a lot of people, most of the places we visited weren't ridiculously packed with people, with the exceptions being Tian'anmen Square and the Forbidden City.

On the first day, we took the metro and then a bus (the bus schedules are written in characters only, with no pinyin, making them pretty difficult to navigate if your character knowledge is pretty basic, as mine is) to the Summer Palace, called Yiheyuan in Chinese, which has been around for 1000 years. The present layout, however, is only from the 18th century, as the palace has been ransacked a number of times over the centuries.


A man painting characters near the East Gate:


Phil and I in front of Kunming Lake:


A three-story theatre:


Some ornamentation on the way up to the temples: