Ni hao!
- Mr. Lin, Beijing
It seems that Beijing is indeed, more a galactical spread than what I thought from The Lonely Planet. Again, time is just playing a funnily cruel game with me and I am in the unenviable position to decide - should I breakfast or not? Probably nothing like even holding a fried Chinese twisted dough and a bowl of hot soya milk, standing in front of Chow Tai Fook Jewellers (Audrey Hepburn style).
I have so much to share, so little time before I got to get down to meet my driver for the day, Mr. Lin, but I definitely will put them down. I owe you yesterday and today. I promise to make it good!
Right, before I speed off to tell you about the day, I have something to share - Mr. Lin.
He retired from the Chinese Air force a while ago and had been Eric's personal driver, xiungdi, and most trusted fella to take us around. If you have seen the way the locals drive (and that I should include the bikers), you would love Mr.Lin. He thrilled us with his deft maneouvers, silent confidence, warm laughter when we shared a smoke and lunch together, and ever accommodating to our lack of proper Beijing "speak-no-chinese", and mind you, he even outpaced us as we walked towards the car.
So as the sun warmed up the arthritic limbs of two sorry looking out-of-towners, we moved like bears that overslept from their winter hibernation, out onto the grounds in front of Yihe yuan, the new Summer Palace which began in 1750, the Reign Year 15 of Emperor Qianlong. Upon entering this place, we encountered unbelievable beauty.
The Kunming Hu covered a big part of the property but it was the endless corridors, the multiple sets of halls and royal residences, the willow trees that lines our cobbled path towards the fort where we took a barge over the lake, and climbed the flights of steps up to the temple, that took our breath, our time, and made us really, stunned. If you really closed away your focus on the gaggles of tourists, you really could imagine yourself back into those times and almost felt the Empress Dowager Cixi next to you (and probably asking your professional opinion about the foreign forces, and not hesitating to lop your head off for her imperial majesty's pleasure).
This place started out as the Garden of Clear Ripples but I personally prefer the present name. It houses reproduction of garden architecture of various palaces in China and the Kunming Hu really reminded me of the real deal in the West Lake in Hangzhou. Given it actually suffered two major attacks during the Anglo-French allied invasion in 1860 (those buggers really spared nothing) and the Boxer Rebellion, how this place still survived and preserved its beauty is beyond me.
If you read Anchee Min's work, you may debate about whether it was true that Cixi diverted 30 million tael of silver designated for the Chinese navy (Beiyang Fleet) into the reconstruction and enlargement of the Summer Palace. But it given it also housed a lot of Emperor Qianlong's work of calligraphy and poem writing, I still am sitting on the fence whether that it was wrong to do so. The Qing dynasty was wobbly, whether another 30 million tael could have prevented a national disaster, I really don't know for sure. There were so many different problems from within the imperial city and the vast foreign forces that were dying to jump on any old missionary helper being bludgeoned to death for offending a local lady.
Who knows?
Lunch ended at Beihai Yuan where we took a lovely walk throughout what I would call the "Central Park" of Beijing. It had a lovely lake with an islet in the middle, with its famous Yashang Restaurant, known to be serving imperial cuisine since the times of Qianlong, even Pu Yi and now, to the paying public. What coaxed my curiosity was that this park has too many cats and they were supposed to be... the guardians? The former concubines?
Perhaps curiosity does kill the cat, but given its rate, and the number of black and white furballs around, I think they were doing pretty well.
