24 Manchu Hours

(PS (pre-script, I guess): if anyone knows how to better manage posts with lots of pictures in blogger, any help would be much appreciated >.< ) 

Ahhh, November in Beijing. The days grow cold, the air grows thick (“it’s just fog, guys, we swear!”), and the roads constantly seem to have a few inches of puddles in them. Though a beautiful freak snowstorm (auspiciously timed to the start of the Beijing Forum) briefly turned our campus into an early winter wonderland, opportunities for outside experiences had returned to the state perfectly encapsulated by the words on the online summary of most Beijing landmarks, “uhhh, November probably isn’t the best time to visit here…”

So, there is but one thing for the restless student to do — bust out of the city! And that’s we did a few Wednesdays ago. In my searches for day trips around Beijing, I came across a TIME article entitled “Five Reasons to Visit Chengde”, and was instantly captivated. Being a Yuanmingyuan aficionado myself, the promise of a summer palace, but with mountains (!) was quite appealing to me. We got together our solid traveling crew, and booked our trip.

We would be taking the night train to Chengde - 6 hours of sleep were the theoretical upper limit, but we were confident that the promise of sightseeing and walking through the snow would keep us fueled for the day. Our train left from Beijing Zhan (Beijing Station — I’m only missing Beijing BeiZhan now in my travels out of the four main stations in the city!), the oldest and most classically beautiful train station in the city. Built by the PRC as part of its ’10 Great Buildings’ to showcase the strength of the new regime and opened in 1959, it was within the former old city wall and boasted some beautiful high-ceilinged waiting rooms that we skipped in favor of a quick (if shitty) burger at the McD’s on the first floor. The roof of the main passage over the tracks was still in full Olympic flair, with murals depicting every continent’s major landmarks dimly seen in the late night lighting. It was roughly midnight; a few night trains were still scheduled to depart, but the station was about as empty as a major piece of transportation infrastructure could get (in that there was a crowd of several hundred around the entrance to our track, but few others milling about). 

BeiJingZhan at midnight

Early morning in the southern suburbs of Chengde

Naoya had pulled the short straw as assigned by the booking algorithm and was banished to the next soft sleeper compartment over (we were five, soft sleepers only have 4 beds a compartment and hard sleepers with 6 were sold out), but for now, until we got too tired, we all gathered in one compartment, sitting on the lower bunks and waiting for the train, K7742, to leave. The compartment was relatively well put together; four bunks, two to a side, framed a small table by the winter with a kettle for boiling water. The door out of the compartment locked and had a mirror on its inside. Access to the top bunk was through a foldable foothold by the door, and each bunk and a little reading light to itself. The space above the corridor could be used for luggage storage if one looked past the crumbs and dirt of many train trips that covered it. The sheets were more or less clean, if one looked past the occasional off-colored stain. 

We left on time, at 12:25 am, passing slowly through the Eastern suburbs of Beijing before turning North towards the mountains. I accidentally gave my ticket to the conductor in exchange for a thicker credit-card-shaped token (apparently a service for the safekeeping of tickets during the night, since they were needed to exit the station). Chips and drinks passed the time before we one by one retreated to our bunks (Naoya to his exile in the next room over). Thankfully the top left bunk that I chose was long enough for me, and honestly, pretty comfortable. I fell asleep very quickly, and woke up to a grey, snowy morning as we rumbled by a series of equally gray new skyscrapers. We had entered the outskirts of Chengde.

It was too foggy to see the mountains around us, but for the last twenty minutes we passed through a town that already felt different from Beijing. Due to geography, the high-rises did not follow the same permanent grid pattern in Beijing, and the architecture became slightly more angular. We arrived in Chengde on time at 6:30am. Outside the station, a socialist statue welcomed us. Hungry, we got some beef noodle soup breakfast at a small restaurant on the train station square, and made our way onwards.

If you ask me, this is the perfect weather to visit this place

Our first destination was the Qing Summer Palace in Chengde, the 避暑山庄 (lit. “mountain villa for escaping the heat”), closer to the dynasty’s Manchu homelands North of the mountains. Though it was cold and snowy out, morning old folk dancing was going as strong as ever in the first square inside the park, Chinese dance pop blasting out across the moving crowd of roughly a hundred. We quickly realized (to our happiness) that we were likely one of only very few tourists who dared make the trek in the winter; almost all other park guests seemed to be locals with season tickets.

The park was fantastic. The light blanket of snow coupled with the lack of crowds gave the whole area a dreamlike quality; palace buildings faded into the fog and small side buildings were perfectly reflected in the absolute stillness of the lake at its center. The mastery of Chinese landscape architecture was once again on show - the terrain itself was used as part of the garden aesthetic, with the mountains both framing the gardens and allowing for pagodas to pop out of their forests to add a background as well. Everywhere in the palace were little reminders that the Qing Dynasty did not tick the same way that most other historical rulers over China did. As presumptive conquerers (they were Manchu, originally speaking a different language, composed of a different ethnic group, and from an area somewhat separate from the main Han-dominated historical region of China), their foreignness followed them throughout their regency. The Qing tried to embrace it as an example of a multicultural China; most of the inscriptions and steles here are written in Manchu, Tibetan, and Mongolian in addition to Chinese (an attempt which ultimately proved to be futile - one of the somewhat incredible abilities of Chinese culture was to completely Sinicize more or less any invaders: today, the Manchu language is all but non-existent, and the last Manchu emperor was said to only speak it at a very basic level. There are currently estimated to only be around 10 native speakers left). 

The multi-ethnic focus of the Qing was also present in the architectural styles of the palace; slightly more varied than one would find in a traditional Han palace, as exemplified by the highest pagoda on the grounds. Octagonal, beige, brick, with a gilded round spire on top, the pagoda did away with the flourishes of earlier Chinese architectural styles and incorporated a Buddhist stupa top. Its courtyard retained a more traditional collection of stone steles carried by large Bixi (stone tortoises that I’m convinced were the inspiration for the Lion Turtles in Avatar), but inscribed in multiple languages as opposed to the traditional (at least for royal palaces) Mandarin.  

The Qing Mountain Resort

Unfortunately, the mountain paths seemed to be closed for the winter (come on, you have a place called the “Pagoda for Watching Snow” and you don’t let people watch snow from it!?), so we had to make do with the “Plains Area” of the palace, still enough for a few hours of leisurely strolling. 

Lunch was the most famous Manchu restaurant in Chengde, and did not disappoint. Deer with vegetables, fried rabbit, and camel meat pancakes (friggin’ amazing) filled the table, accompanied by a thin and flaky Machu-style pancake that tasted more or less like a better fortune cookie that we bought a few packs of for snacks back home. 

Fake, but honestly pretty aesthetically pleasing windows

Two Chinese-style pavilions on top of the Little Potala,
facing the back wall of the Mountain Resort

What's that? This was supposed to be a
Tibetan-style building? Well, this is China. So deal with it.

After lunch, our way took us to the next valley south, to two of the “8 Outer Temples”, built by the Qianlong Emperor (just like everything else in the Qing Dynasty, it seems) primarily to host traveling monks and guests. Our main goal was the “Little Potala Palace,” a small-scale replace of Tibet’s most famous building. Once again, the multi-ethnic composition of the Qing worldview was on full display. From far away, the compound is clearly modeled on Tibetan architecture - the Qianlong Emperor frequently used this place to host Tibetan envoys (though Tibet was no longer the massive empire that could militarily threaten China as it did in the 7th-9th centuries and was now a protectorate of the Qing, it was still an important region to the empire both strategically and culturally). 

View over the valley of the 8 Outer Temples

The campus of the Little Potala. In the background
you can see the ski slopes that the Qianlong Emperor
used to access the temple more quickly.
He was quite the avid skier [citation needed].

But the inside of the palace was unequivocally Chinese. Chinese-style pavilions crowned the building, and the inside of the primary red structure could be mistaken for a Confucian temple in Beijing, barring its larger height. But its status as a replica was clear. Nearly all windows were fake - parts of the wall painted red to mimic the shutter style of the original - and most buildings didn’t even pretend to have a door to enter their empty shells. In a sense, this was once again representative of the struggles the Qing felt - never fully integrated, and having to spend massive amounts of resources to give at least the appearance of a multi-cultural empire that the majority Han were uncomfortable with accepting. The Qing finally fell, and with it Imperial China, after a series of revolts, rebellions, and, most importantly, foreign colonizations, in 1912. 

The way back was on a normal day train, K7712, an old workhorse consisting of double-decker carriages, 5 seats across. Unfortunately, the seat backs themselves felt as if they made less than a 90 degree angle with the seat, so my advice would be to avoid these trains for longer rides. Thankfully, the lack of too many other passengers (no doubt the fact that the train is currently slower than a bus trip to Beijing by a fair bit until the opening of the Beijing-Shenyang High Speed Rail Line in a few years contributed to the low occupancy) meant that we could spread out and nap across the seats (well, this mainly meant I had to enjoy the Yanjing bottle I bought on the way to the train station myself…). Beijing was reached around midnight. Our 24 hours had been successful. 

Last order of business: update the wikitravel page to reflect that no, visiting Chengde outside the summer isn’t ‘depressing’, and also that there are more trains than the 5 listed there.