About a week after the Forbidden City, we visit the Summer Palace in the northwest corner of Beijing. In the thirteenth century, the emperor of the Jin Dynasty moved the capital here, building a palace on what is today called Longevity Hill. After many years of being built, destroyed, and re-built, the area is now a public park.
UNESCO describes the Summer Palace, a World Heritage site,
as a masterpiece of Chinese landscape garden
design
— and indeed it is. We enter the park from
the north end, first taking some steep stone stairs down to the
canal-like Houhu Lake. It starts to rain, so we carefully
navigate the railing-less waterside walkway while hiding under
the small overhangs of storefronts. One of the stores has a nice
selection of kites.
After we climb back up the rugged stairs, we cross the bridge and plaza to begin our journey up Longevity Hill. The yellow tile roofs, red walls, and gray flagstone walkways dominate the hillside, but the architect artfully incorporated many natural elements: for example, using roughly hewn blocks as part of a wall.
At the top of Longevity Hill is the green and yellow
Hall of the Sea of Wisdom, around which lots of tourists ignore
the No climbing
sign and clamber over the many boulders
surrounding the temple.
And walking down the south side of the hill, we are immersed in forest. Several buildings dot the hillside, mostly shaded by the trees.
At the base of the hill is the Long Corridor, an ornately painted covered walkway that stretches 728 meters, with over 14,000 paintings on its wooden beams. I wonder who counted?
We had bought the extra ticket for the Temple of the Fragrant Buddha, and despite not really wanting to climb Longevity Hill again, we reason that it isn’t often that we’ll be in Beijing…and so we climb the 260-something stairs to the huge pagoda. It doesn’t smell very fragrant, but there is a very large wooden statue of Buddha, as well as an excellent view of Kunming Lake and Beijing.
Being tired and sweaty from climbing a mountain twice, we don’t explore too much more of the Summer Palace. We wander around the base of Longevity Hill, through various palaces and gardens, happening upon many beautiful courtyards, museum collections, and even the three-storey opera stage.
One evening, Ken and I head to meet Chen, Ge, and Mandy for dinner. After a long day of walking on the hottest day yet, we decide to catch a cab once off the subway — but several cabbies wave us away. As we return to the sidewalk, an older man hails us from his rickshaw: we look at each other, decide that his price of 60 yuan is far too much, and so we start mapping how to walk. Not giving up so easily, the man calls us again — we haggle — and a few minutes later we are careening down a car-packed street for 30 yuan. He shouts at a driver to squeeze through a jam, turns down a narrow alley, and drops us off, right in front of the restaurant! (Who puts a restaurant down an alley? A lot of places in China, that’s for sure!) Impressed, Ken pays him an extra 10 yuan.
Speaking of alleys: on our way back from exploring the Forbidden City, Ge, Michael and I find ourselves walking right through one!
We walk single file between solid gray walls, hearing only our footsteps on the dusty asphalt. Two motorbikes, and then a rickshaw, honk and speed past us, narrowly missing us, the piles of old furniture, and parked cars. Some segments are barely wide enough to fit one car, let alone two side-by-side. I’m not sure whether I should have my DSLR camera out and visible, because alleys in the United States have a reputation for dumpsters and seedy characters, and now I really don’t know what to expect.
But there are very few other people, and Ge acts like it is perfectly normal and safe to walk through an alley. Someone is selling fresh fruit and vegetables from a few shallow crates under a canopy. Another motorbike passes us and slips through a half-meter wide gap in the fence at the end of the alley; we follow — into the most different environment I could have expected: a lush urban garden with trees and streams.
I have survived my first experience in a hutong.