Summer Palace (Yi He Yuan, 颐和园)

Hi, I am Clement Lin from High Flyers. I will be blogging about the trip on the 30th December Tuesday, where the students visited the Yi He Yuan. It is also known as the "Summer Palace", and served as a summer resort for the Empress Dowager Cixi.

We embarked for the Summer Palace at 7.45am via coach, with this sight greeting us:

Area around Summer Palace entrance

This is the region around the entrance of the Summer Palace. Many ancient relics here are representative of the artistic culture of the past.

It is rather apparent why the Summer Palace has been officially declared as part of the 'World Heritage List', as it is indeed a masterpiece of Chinese landscape garden design. The natural landscape of hills and open water is combined with artificial features such as pavilions, halls, palaces, temples and bridges to form a harmonious ensemble of outstanding aesthetic value.

Here are some examples of what I mean:

Scenic view with the YuFeng Pagoda

Admirable aesthetics of the Kunming Lake

Even in the winter, the Summer Palace is still calmly majestic, exuding a serene aura. I was personally quite surprised that there were actually ducks living here despite the cold weather. The Summer Palace must have indeed been alluring to them.

Ducks swimming in the lake

The Summer Palace is quite accessible, with many entrances. There are quite a number of gates, such as the 'Bei (北)' gate near the SuZhouJie(苏州街) region and the 'Dong (东)' gate where we came from. I climbed the Longevity Hill, with it quite a number of pavilion and temple-like features around the region. However, I enjoyed my experience at SuZhouJie the most.

SuZhouJie's strong traditional appearance

While some people may think that just viewing scenery alone would be boring, there are also fun aspects of the trip, such as my tobogganing experience on a frozen pond in SuZhouJie. I was with Yongzhi in the pond tobogganing for half an hour. It costs 30 yuan, but in my opinion it was well spent.

Highly enjoyable tobogganing experience

We ended with lunch at the nearby McDonalds.

While I do not exactly agree that the 30 million silver taels that Empress Dowager Cixi diverted to the Summer Palace was an excellent expenditure, I am glad that something reflective of the beauty of traditional Chinese architecture would materialize. The trip to the Summer Palace really opened up my eyes and widened my perspective of what traditional Chinese culture truly represents. The values of peace, aesthetics and natural cohesion are strongly observed here, and become even more apparent with careful scrutinization. The front hill is rich in the splendid halls and pavilions, while the back hill, in sharp contrast, is quiet with natural beauty, and this is merely the tip of the iceberg.

Signing off,
Clement Lin High Flyers