Roland's Travelog: Chengde's Mountain Resort

Here's a little more about Chengde I forgot to add to the earlier post..

Chengde in Hebei Province is a scenic summer resort about 250 kilometers northeast of Beijing. As well as the Buddhist temples (see previous post about Chengde) there is also the "Mountain Resort", which was also built during the Qing Dynasty. This rare scenic spot was discovered during a hunting trip and over the course of eighty-seven years the construction of a temporary palace known by the name "Mountain Hamlet for Escaping the Heat" took place, it was completed in 1792. The palace is enclosed by a wall over ten kilometers long, which rises and falls with the mountain ridges. It is the largest and best-preserved imperial palace outside of the capital and China's largest imperial garden, covering an area of over 5.6 million square metres .

Qing emperors often spent several months a year here during summer to escape the heat in the capital city of Beijing and the palace zone in the southern part of the resort was therefore designed to resemble the Forbidden City in Beijing. Many other scenic spots around the resort's lake area were copied from famous landscaped gardens in south China. For instance, the main building on Green Lotus Island, "Tower of Mist and Rain," (Yanyulou) is a copy of a tower in Nanhu Lake at Jiaxing in Zhejiang Province and some other features have been based on Hangzhou's famous West Lake.

Left: Building of the palace grounds.
Right: One of the apparently 90 towers/pavilions at Mountain Resort.

The resort is enormous and you can wander around it all day from spot to spot seeing gardens, lakes, streams, bridges, towers, pavilions, a stupa, wildlife, even a Mongolian yurt park. There are 72 designated 'scenic wonders' in the resort all named by Emperors Kangxi and Qianlong during whose reign the resort was constructed.

Near to the Southern entrance, I spent some time watching locals practicing tai-ji or Diabalo, a spinning, humming wheel that revolves on a string attached between two sticks. Some of the tricks on display were highly impressive, including flinging it back and for between people. Sadly, watching them has not enabled me to even get my damn diabolo even spinning yet.