Day Four (cont.) - The Summer Palace

We crammed a lot into Day Four! 
After the rickshaw ride through the Hutong lanes we went to the Summer Palace - once owned by the infamous dowager Empress Cixi.It's the largest and most well-preserved royal park in China built around the enormous Kunming Lake and is now a public park.

The Temple of Buddhist virtue

Kunming lake with Beijing beyond seen from the temple

 It's a UNESCO world-heritage site and includes a temple complex  (the Temple of Buddhist virtue) a seventeen arched bridge and the Empress's marble boat amongst other buildings. 

The seventeen arched bridge

Empress Cixi's marble boat

To get to the marble boat you walk along the Long Corridor which is another covered and painted walkway, which unsurprisingly is the longest of it's kind. More darkly there is also the palace where she kept her nephew prisoner. 

The Long Corridor

Painted ceiling

It's a really lovely place, but unfortunately I had no time to draw as dinner was calling followed by an acrobat show.  

Bendy girls

With great balance

The acrobats were terrifically good and leapt and dived and bent themselves into amazing shapes. They finished with 5 motorcyclists inside a spherical metal cage - now I wish I had a photo of that!




There wasn't a weird dish of the day as such but at the theatre I had a cup of chrysanthemum tea - I didn't quite expect to look under the lid of the cup and find a cup full of... chrysanthemums. Yes. I know. Actually it tasted fine, it was just like a lot of things on this trip, unexpected!