The Summer Palace

So I'm going to start a series of sightseeing posts, in which I'll highlight some key things I enjoyed at each place, and provide links to my pictures, as well as a slideshow within the post. First of all, you can find all my pictures at this link: Russ Ballard's Picasa Web Albums , and also on my Facebook, if you have one. I have about 800 already to sort through at this point, and I'm trying to pick out the most representative ones, so I'll be gradually posting up more as I go. Anyway, here's the first slide show:

I'm not going to go into extensive detail about the history of the Summer Palace, but mostly because I was given a tour exclusively in Chinese courtesy of Lao Lao 牢牢 and Wai Gong 外公(grandmother and grandfather). I politely nodded and repeatedly commented "是吗?!" (Really!?) but for the most part I was baffled. If you are interested, I can recommend an incredibly reputable website that will give you a brief history-- Wikipedia:Summer Palace. (I hope you're reading this, Ms. Wassall!)

The pictures mostly speak for themselves, but here are a few that I think are particularly interesting:

In the background you can see the "Tower of the Fragrance of Buddha", which is really the centerpiece of the entire summer palace.  It stands at 41 meters high and consists of a three-storied octagonal structure. To get close enough to really see it you need to rent a boat and go out on Kunming Lake

This is the Marble Boat, or the Boat of Purity and Ease, whose solid marble frame was intended to represent the everlasting Qing dynasty. It was, however, destroyed during the second Opium war, and later restored. 

These guys were AMAZING. There's always tons of old men at the Summer Palace writing chinese poetry on the pathways. Some of them carry buckets of water to dip their brushes in, and some have water bottles attached that keep the tip damp I guess. Anyway, they write characters for hundreds of meters sometimes, its ridiculous.

This guy is extra cool because he does it double-time! Any of you who may have attempted traditional Chinese calligraphy before, you know its not easy--try doing it with this level of ambidexterity!