The Great Wall and the Summer Palace

The trip to the Great Wall is the highlight of a trip to China for most people. Our trip to the Great Wall was, frankly, a bit of a disappointment because it was a foggy day. We couldn't see the wall undulating over the hills to the far horizons, couldn't imagine mongol hordes sweeping down from the north, couldn't comprehend with our own eyes the vast scale of the thing. 

We took a cable car to get to the Wall. 

It had snowed a few days before and some patches remained. We looked the battlements and defensive arrangments on the wall and remarked on how similar they were to the defenses in western medieval castles.  We walked along the wall for a while and I thought about the soldiers who'd been stationed there, what their lives had been like, living close together in the blockhouses, and also, how much I looked forward to the next season of Game of Thrones. 
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The next thing I noticed was that the wall is completely covered with....graffiti.

Yes, thousands of people have visited this ancient structure, the very embodiment of the Chinese people, and they decided to scratch or paint their names in the stone. There was plenty of Chinese graffiti, which I deplore, but in particular I'm calling out the Westerners who decided to commemorate their visit to the wall by defacing it. I'm talking to you, Simone, wherever you are -- what the heck were you thinking? Shame on you! 

So after the slight disappointment of the wall, the only thing to do was repair to a nearby restaurant for lunch, then on to visit some Ming dynasty tombs.  The highlight of the trip came on the following day to the area known as the Summer Palace. Remember how the Forbidden City is all stonework with no trees?  Well, that bold designer look worked out really well in the heat of a Beijing summer -- the Royal Family and their retainers must have sizzled like ants on a grill. So they would repair to the suburbs, where they had their own private lake surrounded by hills. Successive kings built pagodas and dwellings here and there on the property. It was the apogee of Chinese craftsmanship, a veritable paradise on earth. I've mentioned this trip briefly in an earlier blog post.

This was the place that the Western armies looted and burned to the ground during the Second Opium War. You can read about this episode in history, with a lyrical description of the Summer Palace in Flashman and the Dragon, one of the ribald historical Flashman series, which Ross and I highly recommend.

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The Summer Palace was partially restored by the Dowager Empress CiXi, with monies intended for the Chinese Navy. She is not held in high regard by the Chinese today, although a recent biography by Jung Chang places her in a more sympathetic light.  Above and below are some "then and now" comparisons.

We had a good long walk around the grounds, which were also being enjoyed by many Chinese citizens, including an amateur choir practicing on the hillside.

For me, the most enchanting and evocative part of the Summer Palace grounds is a recreation, or an idealized recreation, of an ordinary village street in Southern China. According to our guide, one of the Emperors of China loved Southern China so much that he had this street built and he loved to walk along like an ordinary citizen, a la Marie Antoinette at Petit Trianon.

I'm not going to apologize for the actions of the British in 1860, any more than I'd ask my Chinese acquaintances to apologize for killing missionaries and their wives and children. It is what it is, and it was what it was. And also, remember who tore down the "Gate of China" in Beijing?  It wasn't us. It was the CCP, who damaged and destroyed more priceless artifacts than a dozen foreign armies. 

What we can say about the Summer Palace today is that it's now open to the public, not the preserve of royalty.