Two gardens in one
The Summer Palace is not a single composition. It is a hill, a lake and a court, and the reason it rewards a full day on foot is that the three were designed to be read in sequence - the throne room first, then the hillside terraces and temples, then the water. Building began in 1750, when the Qianlong emperor turned a reservoir into a birthday present for his mother and named the place Qingyi Yuan. In 1860 British and French troops burned it, leaving eleven and a half bays of the covered gallery standing. Reconstruction began in secret in 1886 under the guise of naval funding, the name was changed to Yihe Yuan in 1888, and the work finished in 1895. It has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since November 1998 and is a first-batch national key cultural relic site of 1961.
Morning - the court and the covered gallery
We enter from the east and walk the court first - the hall where the emperor gave audience, and the courtyards behind it, including the one where the Guangxu emperor was kept after the reforms of 1898 failed. Then the Long Corridor: 728 metres of continuous covered gallery running along the foot of the hill, painted along its whole length, and acting as a kind of architectural hinge between the hill and the water. The gallery is the single best place to understand how this garden works - the way it frames a view, then hides it, then opens again, and how it lets a court that was used in winter and summer be walked in any weather.
Lunch
Lunch in the garden area, or just outside the north gate.
Afternoon - the hill and the water
After lunch we climb the middle of Longevity Hill to the Tower of Buddhist Incense, 41 metres tall with three octagonal storeys and four tiers of eaves, standing on its terrace above the lake. Below it, the Seventeen-Arch Bridge runs 150 metres across to the island, eight metres wide, with 544 carved stone lions. Then we come down to the water and walk the western and eastern banks, where your guide explains what Kunming Lake actually was: a reservoir expanded in the Yuan dynasty by the engineer Guo Shoujing as part of the water system that supplied the capital and fed the Grand Canal, and thus a piece of infrastructure that a later emperor turned into scenery. The three islands in the lake are a deliberate quotation of the three mountains of the immortals.
Walking and pace
Six to seven kilometres in total, with one sustained climb of about a hundred vertical metres to the tower. There are boats across the lake in season, which can shorten the day considerably; the vehicle waits at whichever gate you finish at.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
