Beijing: Summer Palace and Hike on the Great Wall

On the last day of our trip we will go for a hike on the Great Wall at Mutianyu.

The Great Wall stretches from Shanhai Pass on the east coast to Jiayu Pass in the Gobi desert - an important link on the Silk Road. The “original” wall was begun 2000 years ago during the Qin dynasty (221-207), when China was unified under Emperor Qin Shihuang. Separate walls, built by independent kingdoms to keep out “barbarians” and nomads, were linked up. The construction required hundreds of thousands of workers and according to legends, one of the building materials apart from the estimated 180 million cubic meters of rammed earth was the bodies of deceased workers. The wall actually never performed its function as a defense line. However, it worked very well as a kind of highway, along which men and equipment could be transported across mountainous terrain. Its beacon tower system using smoke signals transmitted news of enemy movements quickly back to the capital.

In the afternoon we will visit the Summer Palace and go for a boat ride on the Kunming Lake.

The Summer Palace - declared by UNESCO as an “outstanding expression of the creative art of Chinese landscape garden design“ is an immense park mainly dominated by Longevity Hill (60 meters high) and the Kunming Lake. This site had long been a royal garden and summer resort for the residents of the Forbidden City. It was enlarged by Emperor Qianlong (1735-1796) as a present for the 60th birthday of his mother. During his reign, Kunming Lake was expanded by extending an existing body of water to imitate the West Lake in Hangzhou and artisans reproduced the garden architecture styles of various palaces in China. Anglo-French troops damaged the buildings during the Second Opium War (1860). Empress Dowager Cixi diverted 30 million taels of silver, said to be originally designated for the Chinese navy (the immobile marble boat at the edge of the lake still reminds the visitor of this story), into the reconstruction and enlargement of the Summer Palace. In 1900 the palace complex suffered another attack by foreign troops during the Boxer Rebellion and was once again badly damaged. Restorations took place a few years later and the Summer Palace was opened to the public in 1924.

We drive back to Beijing. En route we can visit several sports venues for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, like for example the „Bird’s Nest“.