Day 6 – Jang Shin Park, Zoo & Lama Temple

Today is our last day of sightseeing in Beijing, and we have a travel day tomorrow to head to Xian to see the Terracotta Warriors.  We’ve rearranged our schedule on the advice of the guide, so it’s meant that we’ve been full on for the first 5 days, and would now have had a free day, but there are other things to see, so Michael has organised a full days itinerary for us.

First stop for the morning is Jing Shan Park, which is right at the back of the Forbidden City.  The park contains the only hill in central Beijing, and it is a man-made hill as a result of all the soil that was dug out to create the 52m wide moat around the Forbidden City.

Being a public park, there were lots of the elderly doing their exercises.  Today’s variation were a group of elderly gentlemen who were doing calligraphy with a fine tipped mop thing using water on the paving stones on the path.  It was quite a clever way of doing it, because the water hung around long enough for them to write quite a few stones, but there was no lasting impact of it.  There was a tutor there helping then with their calligraphy, and they would form into discussion / chat groups to talk about whatever took their fancy, presumably sometimes calligraphy. 

Another group was doing Tai Chi, and another group was doing a tai chi type thing, but with a racket and ball which you waved around, the object being not to drop the ball off the racket.  I got roped into doing that for 5 minutes, which was quite fun, although I would need a lot more practice before I could be part of their group.

Yet another group was doing amateur opera, although I must admit that Asian music is an acquired taste, that I have yet to feel the need to purchase.

Jing Shan Park is famous for two things – a tree, at the base of the hill, and the views from the top of the hill that gives a magnificent view over the Forbidden City.  The tree has a dark past, because it was here, one night, in 1644 that the last emperor of the Ming Empire committed suicide, by hanging himself.  The people had risen up and had sacked the Forbidden City.  The Emperor had already forced his wife to commit suicide, and murdered his daughter.  As a last ditch attempt to save his kingdom, he fled the City, and at night he sounded a bell, which was to call all his advisors to him, so they could plan a final bid to re-capture the City.  When no one showed up, he and his last Eunuch topped themselves.  The soldiers found their bodies a few days later…… and so began the Qing Dynasty – China’s last.

From there it was the hike to the top of the hill to see the magnificent views over the Forbidden City.  As you will see from the photos, Beijing was having a normal day, and we could only see about half of it.  It was a nice walk though, but as the temperature was around 35 degrees, it was a fairly hot exercise.

Next stop was The Zoo.  We don’t like zoos, but we wanted to see the Pandas, and this was our best opportunity.  There is a place in China where you can visit them at their breeding park in another part of China, but we weren’t THAT keen, so the zoo it had to be.  Also, we’d heard the Pandas are by nature lazy lethargic creatures, so a side trip to go and see some cute animals at best lying around eating bamboo, but more likely sleeping didn’t seem justified.  There is apparently virtually no chance of seeing Pandas mating, even in a breeding park.  As we suspected, we were able to see Pandas, but most of them looked like they had been shoved out into their enclosure and taken two steps before collapsing in a heap and sleeping for the day.  We had some free time, so we wandered around the zoo, which confirmed our view of zoos, although the elephants in the pool, the hippos in their pool, and the birds looked pretty happy.

Lunch was at a magnificent Chinese restaurant.  I say magnificent because the whole building is designed like a royal palace and has all the lanterns and decorations on the front of it.  It is very popular, and even though it is 4 storeys high, and we arrived at 1:30, we still had a 10 minute wait before we could get a table.  The food was delicious, but it was unfortunate that Anne didn’t see the sign for the beer sorbet until we were walking out the door.

The final excursion for the day was to the Lama Temple, which was formerly the Palace of a Manchurian Prince, one of the Qing Dynasty.  The Qing Dynasty was the first Dynasty not to maintain the Great Wall, because they realised it wasn’t working, and would never work.  Their approach to protecting the nation was through diplomacy, and inter-marriage with the people from the North, which was where the aggressors always came from.  The other thing they did was to work closely with minorities, because China is so vast it has something like 50 odd different nationalities within its boundaries, and it was the non Han-minorities that caused most of the problems.  The Lama temple, which is a part of Buddhism was there way of doing that.  Religion has never been my favourite topic, so the rest of the visit was a bit lost on me.  There were lots of buddhas, all with different hand gestures.  There is one 26 metre sandalwood one, and the Lama Temple has something to do with the Dalai Lama, although the current one obviously isn’t best friends with China these days.