Tag: Qing Dynasty

The Retirees Invade China – Day Three – The Summer Palace, The Pandas and the Hutongs

Kerry is not well and needs to rest but insists I carry the flag, so I meet the bus as scheduled and we head for the Summer Palace. Everything is an hour plus in the bus. The hotel is well out of town and the traffic is always horrendous. So after sitting in traffic we arrive. The Summer Palace, is a vast ensemble of lakes, gardens and palaces. Mainly dominated by Longevity Hill and Kunming Lake, it covers an expanse of 2.9 square kilometres three-quarters of which is water.

Longevity Hill is about 60 metres (200 feet) high and has many buildings positioned in sequence. The front hill is rich with splendid halls and pavilions, while the back hill, in sharp contrast, is quiet with natural beauty. The central Kunming Lake, covering 2.2 square kilometres (540 acres), was entirely man-made and the excavated soil was used to build Longevity Hill. The natural landscape of hills and open water is combined with artificial features such as pavilions, halls, palaces, temples and bridges to form a harmonious ensemble of outstanding aesthetic value.

Just as the Forbidden City has the political and the pleasurable pavilions so it is with the Summer Palace. Built in the Qing Dynasty it is only 200 years old but continues in the Ming style. The reversed position of the Phoenix and the Dragon comes about because of a female regent exercising her power. The horned beast is a stylised fertility beast outside of the throne room.

As we walked around the grounds we found several senior citizens practising their calligraphy which is said to be very therapeutic. The lake is the feature along with a covered walkway with paintings depicting Chinese history. The visit over we walked back to the bus which had found a park some distance away. On our way, to find the bus and travel to the Zoo, I found another group of Chinese electric cars and their electric bike.

This is Sunday and parents are visiting the Zoo with their children. Cars park 4 deep from the gutter to off load the family whilst Dad seeks a car park so the bottleneck is again horrendous. Finally, we are offloaded and Eddie goes to buy our tickets – he must have known a man because he seemed to get to the top of the queue very quickly. So, in we go. We are here to see the Pandas – nothing else. Eddie knows the short cut to the Panda trail and the three pavilions built for the Olympics and the Asian games. Fortunately, Pandas are very sedate and it was easy to get photos but that day the China Daily carried an article about a wild Panda that attacked and devoured a goat. Are Pandas China’s great white shark????

Eddie then organised a visit to Yandai Byway (also known as Smoking Pipe Lane). There were stores selling tobacco bags and smoking utensils which led to the name “Yandai Byway” after the large wooden sculpture of a large tobacco bag at the eastern end of the street. You can still find the old image of the store now.

Our main purpose was to visit the Hutong lanes. Hutongs are a type of narrow streets or alleys, commonly associated with Beijing. Hutong is a Mongolian word meaning “water well” and Hutongs were part of the Ming dynasty town planning on a class basis. In Beijing, hutongs are alleys formed by lines of siheyuan, traditional courtyard residences. Many neighbourhoods were formed by joining one siheyuan to another to form a hutong, and then joining one hutong to another. The word hutong is also used to refer to such neighbourhoods.

Since the mid-20th century, a large number of Beijing hutongs were demolished to make way for new roads and buildings. More recently, many hutongs have been designated as protected, in an attempt to preserve this aspect of Chinese cultural history. We walked through the alleys to a hutong which had been owned by its present family down through the generations. Along the way, we encountered more of the small electric cars that seem to be do popular as well as some of the past history of bicycles. After many turns and walking past the public ablutions (hutongs share a communal toilet block which does not have any walls or partitions so you get to know your neighbours intimately) we arrive at the front door of the hutong we are to visit.

Inside the court yard we met the eldest son in the parents’ room to hear the history of the hutong, and then check out the remaining rooms. Beijing has now introduced laws to retain the history of these residences.

We finished off the day with a rickshaw ride/race, the drivers must have the best legs with single gear bikes towing two larger Australians and no brakes other than the soles of his shoes. He also had to contend with traffic of all kinds – wheel chairs motor scooters cars and pedestrians.

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The Retirees Invade China – Day One – Tiananmen Square and The Forbidden City

One thing the travel itinerary did not tell us was how much walking was involved. The bus could never park where we intended to go but some distance from the site and we had to hoof it there. Such was the case with the Forbidden Palace. Now everyone knows the Palace is accessed from Tiananmen Square (not true and I will tell you why – keep reading).

We left the restaurant and we were dropped off near the Square. It has changed a bit since I was there in 1998 so it took me some time to work out that it had been fenced off with a security check installed so you cannot get to the Square without a security check. Unbeknown to everyone an American tourist had been caught with a bullet in his pocket trying to enter the Square and this caused a tizz. There were multiple queues 150 people long and it took an hour of waiting in line to get through so that we could cross to the Square.

From the queue, we could see the Forbidden City and Chairman Mao’s picture on its outer wall. Once in the Square we saw the Column acknowledging all the ordinary people who sacrificed to bring about the new China, Mao’s mausoleum the National Congress Building the National Museum of China and the outer wall to the Forbidden City.

On passing through the outer wall you realise that there were a number of other external walls which have been pulled down over time and all that remains to tell this is the meridian – the central path that runs through the city joining up the random bits that remain of the once mighty walls of the city.

The Forbidden City was the Chinese imperial palace from the Ming dynasty to the end of the Qing dynasty—the years 1420 to 1912. It now houses the Palace Museum. It served as the home of emperors and their households as well as the ceremonial and political centre of Chinese government for almost 500 years.

Constructed from 1406 to 1420, the complex consists of 980 buildings with 8,886 bays of rooms and covers 72 ha (over 180 acres). The Forbidden City is a rectangle, with 961 metres from north to south and 753 metres from east to west. The palace complex exemplifies traditional Chinese palatial architecture. The Forbidden City was declared a World Heritage Site in 1987, and is listed by UNESCO as the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures in the world.

Since 1925, the Forbidden City has been under the charge of the Palace Museum, whose extensive collection of artwork and artefacts were built upon the imperial collections of the Ming and Qing dynasties. We passed through the inner wall and were confronted with a fenced off entrance to the Imperial Palace – the long delay at the security check meant we were too late to visit the Forbidden City.

However, I took photos of the buildings and the architecture which included the sign which I think says Gate of Supreme Harmony.

We left by the eastern gate called East Glorious Gate and outside found remnants of the old moat. At the four corners of the wall sit towers with intricate roofs boasting 72 ridges, reproducing the Pavilion of Prince Teng and the Yellow Crane Pavilion. These towers are the most visible parts of the palace to commoners outside the walls. We walked along an unknown street following Eddie’s yellow flag supposedly a long walk back to the bus which changed to a long walk to “5th Avenue” and a long wait for dinner. The walk allowed us to see more of the old Beijing until we hit 5th Avenue when it all changed and we were in down town New York except everything was in Chinese. We also saw some interesting street art but fled to McDonald’s for warmth and a cup of coffee where we met the “Little Rabbit “. She and her mother sat beside us and her mother allowed us this photo.

Finally, Eddie returned to take us to dinner. We catch the bus for the shortest bus trip of the tour thus far to our restaurant for dinner.  As we get out of the bus, there in front of us is Wangfujing Catholic Church. It was originally named after Joseph, the father of Jesus Christ, as ‘Saint Joseph’s Church. As we walk along I encounter one of the scooters with the cold weather enhancement seen all over Beijing, Dinner was pretty good – five Star restaurant and we left very satisfied for a long ride to our hotel through some traffic snags and I began to realise the Chinese driver is very patient driver to go through this each day. Our trip took us past one of the Olympic Games site all of which was illuminated against the night sky. We also saw the huge growth in apartments that was to be repeated everywhere we went.

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