More from Dongbei

Leaving Harbin, I headed Southwards and made it as far as Shenyang (沈阳), the capital of Liaoning province, which is the only city in China, other than Beijing, with an Imperial Palace. So next morning I visited the palace, its temples, halls and gardens and some of the streets surrounding which together form the attractive old town of Shenyang. The palace and grounds are smaller than the Forbidden City in Beijing and just about the right size so you can, if you have the time, without getting too exhausted, explore every little pathway and every building to see what there is to offer. Something that would take you a week in Beijing's Imperial Palace. It's a quite peaceful and attractive site, not over-run by tourists (at least not at this time of year), worth visiting. In contrast, the rest of the city is quite the opposite, very busy, roads full of traffic, pedestrian streets packed with people and as ever pedestrian crossings and traffic lights are of little consequence, making crossing roads a nightmare. It took me ages to get across the road to picture the huge Mao statue on Zhongshan square, which incidentally was identical in look and pose as to the one in my first Chinese city of this trip, way back three and a half months ago in Kashgar.


All pics: Towers and Halls from the Imperial Palace in Shenyang.

As well as the Imperial Palace I came across an old mansion, a protected national relic, that was the official residence and private house of Marshal Zhang Zuolin, a famous political leader and celebrity of North Eastern China. The final site worth seeing in Shenyang was the huge Mao statue.



All pics: Dragon artwork from around the palace grounds and buildings

The three provinces of North East China are commonly referred to by those from outside of the area as Dongbei, Dongbei means literally 'EastNorth'. Because of the cold weather in this region during winter, every bit of water (except it seems the Yalu river in Dandong, see later) is frozen solid for the winter months. This means winter sports for everyone, whether you like it or not as even walking along roads, it is at times more like skating than walking ;) In Harbin there were ice slides and ice rinks made along the banks of the river and in Shenyang's DongLing Park where the lakes were frozen over, speed skating tracks were marked out. People also slid around on little chairs converted to move around the ice with the help of two ski like poles, this is called a pali and were common in both Harbin and Shenyang


Left: Ice seats called 'pali' are common in Dongbei.
Centre: View form inside one of the halls of Shenyang's Palace.
Right: A typical crowd of Chinese tourists, but in Shenyang this was the only one I saw.