Yuanmingyuan

Two days ago I had my first official tourist experience in Beijing. The night before, I had asked Xia if she had ever been to Yuanmingyuan, the old imperial gardens and the ruins of the old Qing Summer Palace that is situated literally across the street from Tsinghua’s campus. She replied that she hadn’t, but that she had been wanting to since she arrived at Tsinghua last autumn.

After she got out of work on Wednesday, I met Xia in front of her dorm, and we made our way by bike across campus to the West Gate of the university, where we parked our bikes and walked across Zhongguacun Lu to the park entrance. Once again, I would have been out over 20 yuan had Xia not been there—we were able to talk the ticket taker into giving me a student rate on my ticket because I had my Boston College ID on me. Usually such rates are reserved for Chinese students only.

Unfortunately, we were just several days late for the annual Lotus Festival that is held in the park and throughout all of Beijing every spring and summer, so there were not many blooms left. There were a few around, however, and Xia was able to successfully teach me how to pronounce and to remember the two characters that make up the Chinese term for lotus: hehua.

The first phase of the park consisted of the three famous gardens that originally encircled the palace complex to the north. Polished white statues of everything from children to elephants decorated the landscape, and highly-arching bridges let visitors cross over streams to visit rehabilitated temples and farmhouses situated on islands in the middle of the gardens’ many ponds. From the dramatic arch of these bridges and the incredible amount of clearance it allowed for boats passing underneath, it was clear who was prioritized in the distinction between those walking on land and those moving on water—they were made primarily with boaters in mind, not those lugging materials up and over the steeply-arched walkways.

Manicured, circular pods of lillypads dotted each of the numerous ponds we passed by, and fountains placed strategically throughout these waterscapes provided a stunning backdrop for the few lilies left blooming on the watery shores. At one point, we crossed a bridge and I was introduced by Xia to a family who must have had some connections to some office somewhere, because they had been able to obtain a permit to take tourists, for a small price, out onto the lake beyond the bridge to fish.

We stopped to rest for a minute by the shore of this fishing pond, and as I took a sip of water that I had boiled earlier that day that had by now cooled down to drinking temperature, I realized that, for the past 45 minutes, the park had been filled with the noise of the same 30-second long jingle being played over and over and over again, non-stop. It was streaming out speakers attached to lightposts overhead, and it was also blaring out of fake rocks strategically placed along the pathside. I was initially happy that I knew enough Mandarin to make out the gist of what was being said, and Xia was as well: Beijing hua ying ni! “Beijing welcomes you!” After the fifteenth time I had heard the jingle that I realized I understood, I was cursing my knowledge and slowly being driven mad by the singer’s piercing voice.

I was able to get away from the annoying sounds of the fake rocks by speaking to Xia a bit more about her home province of Shandong, which she had earlier described to me as “very beautiful” and attractive to many domestic tourists. There were mountains surrounding her harbor town, and when she was younger she would frequently hike up into these mountains with friends to dig around on the leaf-covered forest floor for wild mushrooms. One day, while they were looking for mushrooms, they happened upon a “puddle in the forest that was very small but very deep.” It seemed like a promising enough place to find some tasty “fungus,” but as her and her friends started to move the leaves below them, the ground below the leaves started moving. In a moment, blossoming out of the puddle in the forest was a colony of smallish watersnakes, so many that Xia described the onslaught as: “the ground looked like it was alive.” The snakes were simply scared, she seemed to think, but the girls were even more scared by the scene, and I can imagine that they never came back to that spot looking for mushrooms.

Towards the back of the park was the entrance to the Old Summer Palace ruins. I asked Xia how old these ruins were, and she replied that construction on the palace began with the ascendancy of the Qing dynasty in 1777. The Qing were of Manchurian descent, and when they invaded from the steppes of Mongolia and Russia to take over China they moved the capital from the center of the country at Xi’an—the capital of China for centuries if not millennia and the location of the terracotta warriors—up to Beijing, a spot closer to their homeland and where they could more easily defend themselves against invaders. Yuanmingyuan--unlike its newer counterpart, Yiheyuan, located just down the street--was eventually pillaged and mostly destroyed by foreign invaders, not from the north this time but from the west; during the Second Opium War, French and British troops ramsacked the place and left hardly anything standing.

There were some stunning things still left standing at the Old Summer Palace, and I was particularly impressed by the designs and flourishes that imperial artists had wrought into the hard granite gateways and columns with chisels and sandpaper, but I ultimately think I enjoyed the gardens more. I was saddened by the fact that, in a country with a recorded history that extends back almost 10,000 years, a destroyed palace that was just 300 years old was a tremendous piece of antiquity. Granted, Beijing had only been the capital of China for about 340 years (although it had been a capital before that time), and that in the scheme of Beijing’s history the palace was of incredible significance, but it simply amazed me that there was not, well, much older, beautiful stuff around. A long history of foreign occupation and ruling governments with mixed feelings about their forebears has clearly taken its toll on this ancient place.

We were both starving by the time we made it through the last of the ruins, but Xia had wanted to the see the family of black swans that the park apparently housed, so we quickly swung by to see the swans’ backsides as they scampered into a reed-filled pond to disappear. We had walked so far that we needed to take a bus back to campus. It was my first time on a bus in Beijing, and I was happy to see that the announcements were made in English as well as Chinese. I told Xia that I was craving dumplings, so we made our way back to the dining hall near our apartments, where I promptly slammed down about two dozen delicious steamed pork dumplings in less than fifteen minutes.

My digestive tract has not been the same since, and I’ve been laid up in my room for two days now on a steady diet of instant noodles, water, orange drink, black tea, Orion pies (kind of like Malomars) and Imodium. I realize that such problems were bound to happen, but I’m looking forward to the day when my stomach finally toughens up to the point that I’ll be able to eat gasoline, and when such gastrointestinal problems will be far behind me. I’ve been using the time to read and relax before things really pick up following the teacher’s orientation this upcoming Monday, but I hope that I feel well enough either later on today or tomorrow to get out to take some pictures of campus and to bike around more of the city.