Welcome to Summer Palace!!--part ll

頤和園的長廊

Now, we keep visiting the spectacular palace. The next spot was the Long Corridor(長廊) whose length is 728 meters. It also had four pavilions during the whole way. The four pavilions named Liu Jia(留佳),retaining the goodness, Ji Lan (寄瀾), living with the ripples, Qiu Shui (秋水), autumn water, Qing Yao (清遙),clear and far means four seasons. The Long Corridor is not only famous for the length but also the artwork more than ten thousand. It was richly decorated with paintings on the columns and ceilings including famous plots and characters in books such as The Tale of Peach-Blossom Land (桃花源記), Five Tiger Generals (五虎將), beautiful sceneries, ancient poetry, Chinese mythologies, and so on.


清宴舫(石舫)

Next we went to the Marble Boat, also known as the name: Qing Yan Fang (清宴舫). The Marble Boat symbolized the stable of country politic and hoped the emperor rule the whole country peacefully. Actually, the Marble Boat was another pavilion in the Summer Palace.


從昆明湖遠眺前山建築

The last one was the 南湖island which located in the southern of the 昆明lake and had a fake mountain on the island. I thought the seventeen-arch bridge was interesting because it had 544 stoned-lions with different vividly looks. It also had temple on the island named 龍王廟 which was used to pray for raining.


昆明湖結冰的湖面上


東堤的文昌閣

Actually, I couldn’t introduce you all spot in the Summer Palace because we had to pay extra money if we wanted to go into some famous spots such as 德合園大戲樓 and the Temple of Buddhist Virtue (佛香閣). After visiting the Summer Palace, I could image ancient emperors and his family living style. In fact, I thought they were luxury and they used a lot of ways to pray for good luck and peace. For example, they preferred to decorate the roof with bats because bat-sound was near “福” in Chinese or they arranged many vases inside the house for the sound “平安”.
According to above examples, I felt that they lived actually without the sense of security because they worried a lot about losing the position of ruling people. Although the structures were really amazing and admired, I thought lived in these buildings were cold because the palace had changed so many times that made the atmosphere indifferent.