Beijing: The Summer Palace

(This is part of a series of posts on our recent trip to China. We'll be posting throughout the summer as we bum around at or near home.)

A short post for a short visit: our trip to Beijing's famous Summer Palace was cut short by intense humidity, high heat, and dense smog.

The Summer Palace

The Summer Palace, located on the outskirts of modern-day Beijing, was the major country retreat of the late Qing Dynasty from 1750 on. In the popular imagination, the palace is forever associated with Empress Dowager Cixi, commonly know as the Dragon Lady, who ruled China as de facto empress from 1835-1908. She was a complex and ruthless woman, but then you have to be if you want to go from concubine to empress, which she did. In 1888, Cixi expanded the palace to its present size by diverting funds from the Beiyang Fleet, China's modernized naval force, thus indirectly contributing to China's disastrous defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War. This defeat in turn fed the 1911 revolution in China which toppled the Qing, China's last imperial dynasty.

However, with the Summer Palace, or the "Garden of Nurtured Harmony" as it's called in Chinese, Cixi did leave behind one of the world's most spectacular gardens, a testament to the enormous wealth of imperial China even in its waning days.

The palace is dominated by two features: the sprawling Kunming Lake and the looming Longevity Hill. Both are man-made--Longevity Hill is made from the earth excavated during the construction of Kunming Lake.

Like most visitors, we entered from the southern end of the palace and crossed the lake in a motorboat done up to look like a 19th-century passenger barge.
Visibility was unfortunately very low: even in the heavily-edited photo below, it's hard to make out any details from about 200-250 yards.
One of the first things you see upon entering the palace from the south is its famous Seventeen-Arch Bridge, which connects a small man-made island to the rest of the park.
The centerpiece of the palace is a complex of temples, towers, and halls on a north-south axis from the lake up to the peak of Longevity Hill. Notice how thick the haze looks in the shot below, even after some tricky photography and some even trickier editing.
We declined an offer to climb to the Temple of Buddhist Virtue--in addition to the oppressive heat, we were also worn out from our Great Wall trek the previous day (upcoming post)--but we did tool around the base of the hill, which offers two of the Summer Palace's best-known sights.

The first is a riverboat-shaped terrace made out of stone, which is probably the most-photographed building in the Summer Palace--and one of the most easily recognizable.
The second is the Long Corridor, a covered walkway that runs along most of the lake's perimeter, allowing residents to enjoy the lake views (when available, of course) and move between buildings without getting drenched by one of Beijing's swift summer rains.The Long Corridor has been fully restored for the upcoming Olympic Games, and is full of pretty little details, as seen in the photo below of the interior roof of one of the junctions.
The grounds off to the side of the Long Corridor also feature some beautiful garden spaces. Below, you can see a typical Chinese landscaped garden scene, with its carefully planned sense of natural seclusion.