Location: Beijing, China
Summary: A smooth arrival, memorable customs check, whistle‑stop visits to the Bird’s Nest, the Summer Palace, and the Lama Temple, followed by an early night after being awake for 38 hours.
We touched down in Beijing at around 06:50, and immigration couldn’t have been easier. The airport was vast but impressively well run. I still remember the customs girl with a particular fondness. She knelt in front of me, smiling up as she patted down my legs and around my crutch. Had she continued much further, she might have discovered something entirely unintended hidden in my underwear.
When we had all gone through the airport and climbed aboard our coach, we were too early to check into the hotel. We couldn't go there until the afternoon, our luggage was sent ahead to the hotel, while we set off for a morning of sightseeing.
Birds Nest Stadium
The Beijing National Stadium, officially called the National Stadium, was built for the 2008 Summer Olympics, where it hosted the opening and closing ceremonies, the athletics events and the football final; it went on to host the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2022 Winter Olympics as well. Its nickname, the Bird’s Nest, comes from its exposed lattice of steel beams, which was designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron after studying Chinese ceramics and which conceals the supports for the roof; the lead Chinese architect, Li Xinggang, noted that in China a bird’s nest is something eaten on special occasions, which he took as a fitting compliment rather than an odd comparison.
Far from sitting idle since 2008, it’s stayed in regular use: it’s hosted major concerts, the 2015 World Athletics Championships (returning in 2027), European football friendlies and the Italian Supercoppa, the League of Legends World Championship final, and the finals of The Voice of China. Alongside its day-to-day life as one of Beijing’s biggest tourist draws.
The stadium was our first stop after we left the airport and wasn't so much a trip to see it as a photo stop. We parked in the huge car park for five minutes. Everybody got off the coach took a photo of the stadium from across the car park and then got back on the coach to move on again.
Summer Palace
The Summer Palace, on Beijing’s northwestern outskirts, is a sprawling complex of palaces, pavilions, & gardens built around a lake, continuing a tradition of imperial retreats that goes back to the Jin dynasty. Its main buildings date from 1750 to 1764, when the Qing emperor Qianlong had it constructed as a gift for his mother, centred on Kunming Lake (dug out and modelled on Hangzhou’s West Lake) and Longevity Hill behind it, which carries a scatter of Tibetan-style temples on its northern slope. The site was laid out in three zones: an administrative area for state business, a residential area for the imperial court, and the scenic lakes and gardens the palace is best known for today.
It has been destroyed twice. European forces burned and looted the palace in 1860 and again in 1900, and both times it was Empress Dowager Cixi who had it rebuilt. Work that came to be seen by many Chinese people as a stand against foreign aggression rather than mere restoration. After the 1911 revolution ended imperial rule, the palace was opened to the public, and from 1924 it became an ordinary park for Beijing’s residents rather than a royal preserve. It has remained in continuous restoration since 1953, was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998, and today functions as both a working city park and one of Beijing’s most visited tourist sites. It is busy with locals walking the lakeshore as much as with visitors photographing the Long Corridor and the Marble Boat.
We spent around 2½ hours wandering the Summer Palace. The grounds were beautiful, and the scale of the man‑made lake is astonishing when you consider the labour it must have taken to build.
I walked the Long Corridor and passed several buildings on the way to lunch at the Ting Li Guan restaurant. Our group was split between two tables. Girls in traditional Chinese dress served a selection of dishes arranged on a lazy Susan. The food was excellent, but the heat and humidity were something else: no air conditioning, not even a fan, so we ate in what felt like a slow cooker.
After lunch, we explored a few nearby buildings before visiting the Marble Boat on Kunming Lake. We then crossed the lake on a beautifully decorated dragon boat before rejoining the coach and leaving to continue our Beijing tour.
Lama Temple
The Lama Temple, officially the Yonghe Temple, started out as something quite different from the Tibetan Buddhist monastery it is today: construction began in 1694 on the former site of a Ming-dynasty residence for court eunuchs, and the compound became the home of Prince Yong, a son of the Kangxi Emperor. When Prince Yong took the throne as the Yongzheng Emperor in 1722, his old residence was elevated to palace status, and his son, the future Qianlong Emperor, was reportedly born there. Only after Yongzheng’s death in 1735, when his coffin lay there temporarily, did his successor Qianlong convert the whole complex into a lamasery in 1744, bringing in monks from Mongolia and Tibet. This made it the national centre of Lama administration under the Qing. This included the oversight of lama reincarnations from 1792 onward.
Its most striking feature is in the Pavilion of Ten Thousand Happiness: an 18-metre tall statue of the Maitreya Buddha, carved from a single piece of white sandalwood, with another 8 metres sunk below ground. This was a gift from the seventh Dalai Lama to Qianlong that reportedly took three years to transport from Tibet to Beijing. The temple was closed for 32 years after 1949 and didn’t reopen until 1981, but today it’s both a functioning Gelug-school Tibetan Buddhist temple, with resident monks and regular worship. It is also one of Beijing’s most popular tourist sites, known for the thick clouds of incense smoke that drift through its courtyards.
We stopped for a brief time to look around the Yonghe (Lama) Temple. What struck me was the number of visitors who clearly had no understanding of Buddhism but were buying incense sticks anyway. They didn’t light them, just placed the whole bundle, still tied together, into a tray outside the temple. I imagine they’re collected, dusted off, and sold again tomorrow.
For me, the final Buddha was the most spectacular: carved from a single tree, filling the entire building. It rose 80 metres above ground and extended another 80 metres below, an extraordinary sight.
Hotel
We reached our hotel around 14:30, and most of us collapsed for a quick nap before the evening’s welcome drink and dinner. I showered, set up my computer, and Skyped my mum. I tried to post the day’s photos on Facebook, only to discover Facebook is blocked in China. Thankfully, my website wasn’t, so the holiday snaps still made it online.
Dinner was an excellent Chinese meal served around a lazy Susan. The bar beer was ¥45 for less than half a pint, so I wandered to a nearby shop and picked up four cans of Budweiser for ¥35.
Back in my room, I planned to watch some football with a cold beer, but by 20:45, I was out cold. After 38 hours awake and travelling halfway around the world to a continent I’d never visited, it felt like a strong start to my holiday.
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