Summer Palace

Summer Palace is a beautiful place, and a beautiful example of the excesses of emperors and empresses. The rulers wanted a place that looked like West Lake in Hangzhou. So the first part of the project was to "build" some "mountains" to build the palace on...

The next step was to build the lake. Amazing what you can do with the country's riches and low-paid labor. Hmm... that actually sounds like today's China, too.

Here's a view from the top. The major expansion of the lake came in the 1800's, when Empress Cixi wanted to be able to watch her Navy peform naval battle shows.

Her extravagence was revealed when the Japanese destroyed the Chinese navy in 1894 in the first Sino-Japanese War. As a result, China recognized Korea as an independent country and gave Taiwan to Japan. The empire of the Qing Dynasty eventually completely collapsed in 1912. If they had only invested money in a real navy instead...

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These palace grounds are huge and require several hours to cover the grounds and lake. I went here with my friend Darryl from Wichita who is in town and we had a great time here. We took a boat out on the lake to check things out and got some fun pictures:

Coming up to the shore on the other side we saw a large TV screen next to the pagoda. There were a couple of hundred Chinese watching the China vs Spain women's basketball game:

Notice all of the umbrellas? No, it's not raining... the smog was light enough this day that you can actually see shadows on the ground from the people. The Chinese carry umbrellas for two reasons: 1. is to keep them cooler, 2. is to keep their skin as white as possible.

Why do Westerners want to lay out and get dark while the Chinese fear the sun and want to be light?! I guess everybody wants what they don't have...

Last picture, here's a friendly kid saying "Ni hao" to us foreigners.