Thursday June 25 - Bishu Shanzhuang - Chengde

We had a lovely lazy morning before hitting the streets for brunch. Then it was off to visit Bishu Shanzhuang, litterally a 10 minute walk from the hotel. Bishu Shanzhuang is the summer resort of the Qing emperors. It was started in 1703 by Emperor Kangxi as a hunting lodge and gradually grew into a summer palace. It used to take 7 days to get here from Beijing and the Emperor would bring 10,000 people with him. The palace was eventually abandoned in 1820 after Emperor Jiaqing died there - supposedly struck by lightening. You enter the main gate and then go through a series of 9 pine-treed courtyards containing 5 halls. The wings on either side of the halls contain various exhibits such as pottery from the Ming Dynasty - fantastic; clocks - a really interesting collection of old Chinese and Europpean clocks; and glass ware. The halls include the Emperor's Study, and the living quarters, poetically called the Hall of Refreshing Mists and Waves. One part of this latter hall is the emperor's bedroom. On either side is the Pine Crane Palace for the empress dowager and on the other the apartments where the concubines lived. Then when you walk through that you enter a huge parkland containing gardens, a deer forest where the deer are so tame they pose for you to take their pictures and will allow you to go up to them and almost touch them; a lake, various temples, pagodas, all surrounded by a 10 km long wall. There were some pretty sites, but time has taken its toll on the buildings and the maintenance of the park. Nonetheless, if you stretch your imagination back in time, it would have been absolutely magnificent. When we finished there Ray came back for a nap and I went to the Internet for an hour, unfortunately mistaking the time because I actually had 2 hours not one!! On our way back a truck working at a roadworks site suddenly lurchd in front of us into a big hole in the road and almost toppled over, coming to rest with its hind left wheel up to the axle in the hole. I thought it was going to topple over, but it didn't although the two outer wheels on the opposite side were off the road. The workers quickly emptied all the earth out of the Truck and we didn't wait around to see what happened then! But it wasn't there next time we looked. We had a group dinner at 7:00 p.m. and went for a "steamboat". This is the Chinese equivalent of a "fondue". You have a propane fired burner in the middle of the table containing two types of "soup", one spicey hot, and one spicey cool. Then you choose dishes of food such as beef, lamb, vegetables, prawns, chipalatta sauceages, spam, mushrooms, etc. and they are cooked in the sauce as you sit around and chat. I can't say it was my favorite meal, but no doubt if I had had the opportunity to choose my own dishes to put in the soup, I would have chosen differently and would probably have enjoyed it a lot more. Nonetheless, the concept is terrific. After dinner we strolled back as a group and ended up in a KTV place (karaoke). What a dump - I haven't been in anything like it for a long time! Nothing like the one we were in in Lanzhou. It was all private rooms, filled with drunken Chinese (oops and westerners!), consuming vast quantities of liquor, and supposedly singing along to knock off hit songs. The atmosphere was rank with the smell of cigarette smoke, and the bathroom was putrid - so much so I walked in, then walked out again. I saw all the rooms when I went in search of a bottle of water. What chaos some of them were in! It was an "eye-opening" experience, and not one we needed to participate in, so after a beer, we left and walked back to the hotel ...and bed.