The Summer Palace (Yiheyuan): Kunming Lake and Longevity Hill

In Haidian District northwest of the Third Ring Road, the Summer Palace (Yiheyuan) was the Qing imperial court's grand lakeside garden escape from the summer heat of the walled city. First expanded in 1750 by the Qianlong Emperor for his mother's birthday and rebuilt by Empress Dowager Cixi in the late nineteenth century, the 290-hectare park is a masterpiece of classical Chinese landscape design. Three-quarters of its surface is water: spring-fed Kunming Lake was dug out by hand in the shape of a longevity peach and modelled on West Lake in Hangzhou, while the excavated soil was sculpted into sixty-metre-high Longevity Hill (Wanshoushan) along the northern shore.

Choosing your entry gate and route

Because the park is vast, choose between two efficient entry points on Subway Line 4 and always select the through-ticket if you want to enter the inner hilltop courtyards:

• North Palace Gate (Beigongmen Station, Line 4): the most dramatic route. Enter from the north to look immediately down onto the canal-side shopfronts of Suzhou Street and the colourful Tibetan- and Han-style stupas of the Four Great Regions on the back slope of Longevity Hill, before climbing over the ridge and descending the front staircase toward the lake.
• East Palace Gate (Xiyuan Station, Line 4 and Line 16): the historic ceremonial entrance, leading directly to the Hall of Benevolence and Longevity (where Cixi and the Guangxu Emperor held audiences behind a bronze mythical qilin beast), the residential courtyards of Yulan Hall and the three-level wooden opera stage in the Garden of Virtue and Harmony.

Highlights along the lakefront

Dominating the front slope of Longevity Hill is the forty-one-metre octagonal Tower of Buddhist Incense (Foxiangge), perched on a massive stone foundation with sweeping views across Kunming Lake to the Jade Spring Hill pagoda and the Western Hills. At the foot of the hill runs the 728-metre Long Corridor (Changlang), a covered wooden walkway whose crossbeams are hand-painted with more than fourteen thousand miniature landscapes, bird-and-flower vignettes and scenes from classic novels such as Journey to the West and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Walk west to the two-deck Marble Boat, or follow the eastern willow embankment to cross the 150-metre Seventeen-Arch Bridge guarded by 544 individually carved stone lions. Pair a morning here with an afternoon at the nearby Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan).