We all know someone who knows someone who has a vacation home; a cabin by the lake, a house on the Cape. Even Bernie recently acquired a lakefront summer home!
Hate to break it to you, but wherever you stayed that one summer has nothing on the Summer Palace, built as merely a garden for after-dinner strolls and tea-time entertainment for the imperial family. This is the lakefront of all lakefronts.
My favorite spot on Longevity Hill, is the 1750 holy structure behind the Tower, for its bright colors, its intricately carved mini-Buddhas that dot the facade, and its dreamy name, Hall of the Sea of Wisdom. It also reminds me of the colorful temples in Southeast Asia that I love. If only we could peek inside to see the Guanyin, Goddess of Mercy!
As you weave through the huge complex you might stumble upon a little ticket window for the The Garden of Virtue and Harmony, where the biggest historical theater was built for her highness, Empress Cixi to enjoy performances of Peking Opera. In front they’ve constructed a fancy, modern, temperature-controlled gallery of antiques, and in the back is the three-story opera hall. Empress Cixi of course had the best seat in the house, directly across from the stage where three performances went on at once.
I’ve never been to Tibet but at first glance, the back entrance into the Summer Palace with the breadth of its walls and staircases and the white pagodas, the Four Great Regions seemed reminiscent of Tibet’s massive monasteries. With a quick google search, I discovered that it was indeed inspired by Tibet’s first Buddhist monastery, Samye Gompa. I also learned that the same monastery inspired the design of Puning Temple located in Chengde, Hubei Province, which is funnily enough, home of the other imperial summer palace!
At the Back Hill of the Palace is the famous Suzhou Market Street, whose creation was an act of Emperor Qianlong’s love (or lust and greed) for one of his favorite concubines, a nun from Suzhou. After being brought to live with the Emperor in Beijing, the nun-concubine inevitably got homesick. To soothe her longing, the Emperor built Suzhou Street to resemble the nun’s hometown so that she could feel at home while staying close to the Emperor. I suppose that’s better than keeping someone in a dungeon! (You can read more about the arguably romantic story here).
Since the Summer Palace opened up to the public in 1924, I’ve visited a handful of times, but due to confusion on how to use iCloud, I’ve accidentally deleted a chunk of my beloved photos. That said, there’s A LOT more to the Summer Palace than I’ve shared here. To see it all would take a good 3-4 hours, and on a nice sunny day, a boat ride on Kunming Lake is a romantic way to explore the massive compound. It’s way out from central Beijing, but a trip to Beijing would be incomplete without a stroll here. And if you have time to venture further out beyond the imperial walls, you’d reach migrant neighborhoods where heating is an unaffordable luxury and schools are in the worn conditions you see on television. But that’s another blog post…
Here are a few more photos I’ve retained from a recent trip:
Back in the ‘Jing!