Chengde Mountain Resort Day Trip: Qing Lakes and Eight Outer Temples

Roughly 220 kilometres northeast of Beijing across the Yanshan range in Hebei Province, the city of Chengde holds the grandest royal garden-and-monastery complex outside the capital: the UNESCO World Heritage Mountain Resort (Bishu Shanzhuang, literally the Villa for Escaping the Heat) and its surrounding semicircle of Eight Outer Temples (Waibamiao). For nearly a century under the Kangxi, Yongzheng, Qianlong and Jiaqing emperors, the Qing court moved north to Chengde for up to five months every year between May and October, turning this cool mountain valley into the de facto summer capital of the empire. Thanks to the Beijing-Harbin High-Speed Railway, Fuxing bullet trains from Beijing Chaoyang Station (Subway Line 3) now reach Chengde South Station in just 52 to 65 minutes, making it an effortless day trip or overnight excursion.

The Mountain Resort (Bishu Shanzhuang): China in miniature

Enclosed by a ten-kilometre crenellated stone wall that climbs the surrounding hills like a miniature Great Wall, the 560-hectare Mountain Resort is nearly twice the size of Beijing's Summer Palace. Rather than glittering yellow roof tiles and red lacquer, the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors built the Main Palace halls out of unadorned grey bricks and dark, fragrant hard-pine beams (nanmu and pine) to project frugal scholarly simplicity.

Behind the palaces, the park deliberately reproduces the geography of the entire Qing realm in three distinct zones: the Lake Area in the southeast, modelled on the misty islands and causeways of Jiangnan (including the 1751 golden-roofed Yanyu Tower on an island); the Plains Area (Wanshuyuan, Garden of Ten Thousand Trees) in the northeast, where the emperors pitched giant Mongol yurts to feast frontier princes and watched horse racing; and the rugged Mountain Area covering four-fifths of the northwest grounds.

Puning Temple and the "Little Potala Palace"

Ringing the northern hilltops outside the resort wall stand the Eight Outer Temples, built in Tibetan, Mongol and Han architectural styles to welcome the Panchen Lama, Mongolian khans and Kazakh envoys without forcing them into smallpox-prone Beijing:

• Putuo Zongcheng Temple (Little Potala Palace): built between 1767 and 1771 for the Qianlong Emperor's sixtieth birthday, modelled directly on the Potala Palace in Lhasa; climb to the top of its soaring crimson Dahongtai (Great Red Terrace) to see the gilded copper roofs of the Wanfaguiyi Hall.
• Puning Temple (Temple of Universal Peace): an active monastery housing the world's tallest wooden sculpture of a Buddhist deity, a 22.28-metre thousand-armed, thousand-eyed Avalokitesvara (Guanyin) carved from pine, cypress, elm, fir and linden wood.