China Day 6 (Thursday): Summer Palaces
Aug. 2nd, 2006 09:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienBy Tucson reckoning, it was still my birthday until three o'clock in Beijing's Thursday afternoon. Be that as it may, I went on another tour, this one a less heavily subscribed one to the Summer Palace and the ruins of the Old Summer Palace.
This was the summer retreat for the Emperor, built on the northwest of Beijing, by one of them as an alternative to taking the long trip south every summer, and given as birthday present to his mother. It was still a long commute for the bureaucrats who had to come out from the city every day! Burned down in the Second Opium War of 1860, it was restored by the Dowager Empress Cixi, of dubious memory, in the 1880s.
The compound is based around an artificially enlarged lake and a pagoda-crowned hill built out of the dredgings from the lake. The architecture is similar to that of the Forbidden City and the Tombs, but less formal, more relaxed, with mostly grey tile roofs. Most of the names of the buildings seemed to be to do with longevity, happiness, and relaxation, but I must admit taht I have a hard time keeping all these positive quantities and their associated heraldry straight. (Talking of heraldry, I got pictures of a dragon, a phoenix, and a quilin, or Chinese Unicorn. There ought to have been a turtle around there somewhere too, but I don't remember it. It was all very crowded, of course, and it was hard to get pictures of anything that didn't have Chinese children posing in front of it. It's a vast place, and we only saw a bit of it, on a very grey and murky morning that didn't allow us much of a view across the lake. There were lots of interesting-shaped openings -- bats, stars, crescents -- in the walls around the living quarters. Really, I'd have liked to have more time to explore, rather than standing for ten minutes in one courtyard listening to tales of the Dowager Empress's lifestyle, then dashing on to the boatride on the lake.
(Apparently Cixi was very anxious to keep her beauty, and so kept extremely regular hours, slept on a jade pillow, and used pearl powder for her skin. She was served about a hundred dishes at every meal, though she only ever sampled a couple; it cut down on the chance of poisoning, and the rejects would be passed on to favoured underlings. She was de-facto ruler of China for about half a century, the literal 'power behind the throne' for a couple of boy Emperors, and did a lot to stand in the way of modernization. She got her start, from the ranks of the junior concubines, initially by bribing eunuchs to find out the Emperor's taste in music, clothes etc., then matching them precisely to catch his attention. Then she had the good luck to fall pregnant before the next favourite came along, and the rest was history. She was buried on a stack of precious silks two meters thick, but the tomb was looted by a warlord ten years later. The apparent lack of decomposition was attributed to a giant pearl found in her mouth, but I'm inclined to suspect it was just the hermetic-tomb effect.)
On the walk down to the lake someone thrust a carved mahogany dragon under my nose, and I bought it -- I probably should have bargained the price down, but it wasn't much, and I like it even if I'm not sure it's really mahogany. I'm reasonably sure it's wood of some kind. I'm not sure if the lady who later tapped me on the arm and handed me a carrier bag for it was the original vendor, or if it was just one of those random acts of helpfulness.
The famous Long Corridor, adorned with paintings by court artists of scenes the Emperor had seen on his travels, like a quarter-mile-long postcard album, was closed for renovation. ("It in construction ahead. Visiters go around it!") We walked down to the famous marble paddleboat, then caught a dragon-boat across to the other side of the lake, ostensibly to get good views of the palace, but the murk did is no favours there. Waiting for the bus on the other side, we were accosted by beggars. That was the first time I'd seen money in denonimations smaller than the 1 Yuan (12.5 US cents) note; most things for tourists are priced in tens of Yuan.
(Pictures here.)
From the Summer Palace we went on to the Pearl Factory, where we were given a demonstration that involved sacrificing a live freshwater oyster right in front of us to reveal the irregular little four-year pearls inside. The prices on the good stuff, the saltwater 'golden pearls' was a bit steep for me, but I bought a little strand of pleasingly irregular freshwater ones, and watched as the saleswoman knotted it into a necklace for me. (Like a lot of Chinese women, she was tiny, and I had to nearly kneel down to have it fitted.)
Then we went to lunch, in the restaurant of a ritzy health club in a government complex. The servers were very helpful -- even helping my neighbour maneuver a slippery morsel from the serving plate -- but kept bringing us glasses of steaming hot water whether we asked for tea or water. We finally managed to get tea, but I don't think the lady who wanted coffee ever got any. How to eat unsweetened egg custard with chopsticks? One solution I though of too late to do any good was to mix it in with the rice. It was a Cantonese restaurant, according to the guide. Another bit of local north-south stereotyping; southerners are thin because they fill up on soup first. (Not that many Chinese are at all heavy by Western standards). The soup with the meal was pretty good.
This, according to our guide, was the ruins of former summer palace that even the emperor coudn't afford to rebuild after the French and British burned it in 1860. It burned for three days, and then the locals and soldiers looted the remains. (The history is confusing, though; the official Chinese sources put the date of destruction at 1900. As far as I can make out, the bit that we saw was the stone-built European-style palaces, which did mostly survive 1860 but were a tiny part of the whole.) In the 1990s there was an artists' commune living in the park. Now somewhat restored as an object-lesson in patriotism, though I'm not quite sure what lesson the Chinese are supposed to take from it. Don't trust foreigners? A crocodile of children in the parking lot waved and called 'Hello! We love you!' to our obviously European group.
The corner we saw must have been quite a place in its day -- built in European style, with a few Chinese touches to keep the Emperor comfortable. There were scale models in perspex cases to show the principal buildlings, adrift in rolled-up small money thrust through the ventilation holes as a wish for prosperity. A maze where the Emperor used to play games with his concubines has been restored with lower walls than the original 2.5m and an elaborate cupola in the middle. There was a peacock aviary, and a chapel for a favored concubine (the fragrant concubine). Among the grass were piles and pieces of carved marble lying around or stacked up; pillars and arches;
a water tank like an upside-down step pyramid, sealed with rice glue and still standing. The sun came through the haze a bit, so I got some half-decent pictures.
I was torn between thinking that the destruction of this palace was one of the worse acts of cultural vandalism perpetrated by the colonial powers, and a sneaking suspicion that in its original glory the place might have been just a little bit tacky. (Later, I also wondered what would have happened to it in the next century, and rather suspected government offices or somesuch.)
Some of the long-lost treasures have recently turned up on the international market, and wealthy Chinese businessmen have been able to buy them to give back to the government.
This was the summer retreat for the Emperor, built on the northwest of Beijing, by one of them as an alternative to taking the long trip south every summer, and given as birthday present to his mother. It was still a long commute for the bureaucrats who had to come out from the city every day! Burned down in the Second Opium War of 1860, it was restored by the Dowager Empress Cixi, of dubious memory, in the 1880s.
The compound is based around an artificially enlarged lake and a pagoda-crowned hill built out of the dredgings from the lake. The architecture is similar to that of the Forbidden City and the Tombs, but less formal, more relaxed, with mostly grey tile roofs. Most of the names of the buildings seemed to be to do with longevity, happiness, and relaxation, but I must admit taht I have a hard time keeping all these positive quantities and their associated heraldry straight. (Talking of heraldry, I got pictures of a dragon, a phoenix, and a quilin, or Chinese Unicorn. There ought to have been a turtle around there somewhere too, but I don't remember it. It was all very crowded, of course, and it was hard to get pictures of anything that didn't have Chinese children posing in front of it. It's a vast place, and we only saw a bit of it, on a very grey and murky morning that didn't allow us much of a view across the lake. There were lots of interesting-shaped openings -- bats, stars, crescents -- in the walls around the living quarters. Really, I'd have liked to have more time to explore, rather than standing for ten minutes in one courtyard listening to tales of the Dowager Empress's lifestyle, then dashing on to the boatride on the lake.
(Apparently Cixi was very anxious to keep her beauty, and so kept extremely regular hours, slept on a jade pillow, and used pearl powder for her skin. She was served about a hundred dishes at every meal, though she only ever sampled a couple; it cut down on the chance of poisoning, and the rejects would be passed on to favoured underlings. She was de-facto ruler of China for about half a century, the literal 'power behind the throne' for a couple of boy Emperors, and did a lot to stand in the way of modernization. She got her start, from the ranks of the junior concubines, initially by bribing eunuchs to find out the Emperor's taste in music, clothes etc., then matching them precisely to catch his attention. Then she had the good luck to fall pregnant before the next favourite came along, and the rest was history. She was buried on a stack of precious silks two meters thick, but the tomb was looted by a warlord ten years later. The apparent lack of decomposition was attributed to a giant pearl found in her mouth, but I'm inclined to suspect it was just the hermetic-tomb effect.)
On the walk down to the lake someone thrust a carved mahogany dragon under my nose, and I bought it -- I probably should have bargained the price down, but it wasn't much, and I like it even if I'm not sure it's really mahogany. I'm reasonably sure it's wood of some kind. I'm not sure if the lady who later tapped me on the arm and handed me a carrier bag for it was the original vendor, or if it was just one of those random acts of helpfulness.
The famous Long Corridor, adorned with paintings by court artists of scenes the Emperor had seen on his travels, like a quarter-mile-long postcard album, was closed for renovation. ("It in construction ahead. Visiters go around it!") We walked down to the famous marble paddleboat, then caught a dragon-boat across to the other side of the lake, ostensibly to get good views of the palace, but the murk did is no favours there. Waiting for the bus on the other side, we were accosted by beggars. That was the first time I'd seen money in denonimations smaller than the 1 Yuan (12.5 US cents) note; most things for tourists are priced in tens of Yuan.
(Pictures here.)
From the Summer Palace we went on to the Pearl Factory, where we were given a demonstration that involved sacrificing a live freshwater oyster right in front of us to reveal the irregular little four-year pearls inside. The prices on the good stuff, the saltwater 'golden pearls' was a bit steep for me, but I bought a little strand of pleasingly irregular freshwater ones, and watched as the saleswoman knotted it into a necklace for me. (Like a lot of Chinese women, she was tiny, and I had to nearly kneel down to have it fitted.)
Then we went to lunch, in the restaurant of a ritzy health club in a government complex. The servers were very helpful -- even helping my neighbour maneuver a slippery morsel from the serving plate -- but kept bringing us glasses of steaming hot water whether we asked for tea or water. We finally managed to get tea, but I don't think the lady who wanted coffee ever got any. How to eat unsweetened egg custard with chopsticks? One solution I though of too late to do any good was to mix it in with the rice. It was a Cantonese restaurant, according to the guide. Another bit of local north-south stereotyping; southerners are thin because they fill up on soup first. (Not that many Chinese are at all heavy by Western standards). The soup with the meal was pretty good.
This, according to our guide, was the ruins of former summer palace that even the emperor coudn't afford to rebuild after the French and British burned it in 1860. It burned for three days, and then the locals and soldiers looted the remains. (The history is confusing, though; the official Chinese sources put the date of destruction at 1900. As far as I can make out, the bit that we saw was the stone-built European-style palaces, which did mostly survive 1860 but were a tiny part of the whole.) In the 1990s there was an artists' commune living in the park. Now somewhat restored as an object-lesson in patriotism, though I'm not quite sure what lesson the Chinese are supposed to take from it. Don't trust foreigners? A crocodile of children in the parking lot waved and called 'Hello! We love you!' to our obviously European group.
The corner we saw must have been quite a place in its day -- built in European style, with a few Chinese touches to keep the Emperor comfortable. There were scale models in perspex cases to show the principal buildlings, adrift in rolled-up small money thrust through the ventilation holes as a wish for prosperity. A maze where the Emperor used to play games with his concubines has been restored with lower walls than the original 2.5m and an elaborate cupola in the middle. There was a peacock aviary, and a chapel for a favored concubine (the fragrant concubine). Among the grass were piles and pieces of carved marble lying around or stacked up; pillars and arches;
a water tank like an upside-down step pyramid, sealed with rice glue and still standing. The sun came through the haze a bit, so I got some half-decent pictures.
I was torn between thinking that the destruction of this palace was one of the worse acts of cultural vandalism perpetrated by the colonial powers, and a sneaking suspicion that in its original glory the place might have been just a little bit tacky. (Later, I also wondered what would have happened to it in the next century, and rather suspected government offices or somesuch.)
Some of the long-lost treasures have recently turned up on the international market, and wealthy Chinese businessmen have been able to buy them to give back to the government.