Temple of Heaven Park

On Christmas Eve Neil and headed out to see one of the famous Beijing sites – Temple of Heaven Park. Here we met up with Piers, an AYAD based in Manila who was also on holiday in China visiting his sister and her family. The Temple of Heaven Park is a huge place. As we walked through the western gate we came across local Chinese ballroom dancing, latin dancing to Chinese folk music, Chinese playing hackey sack, twirling colourful ribbons, practising tai chi, playing paddle ball, playing checkers and chess, playing musical instruments and singing. It was pretty amazing, especially because it was so cold!

We wandered around the park viewing many of the major sites. Unfortunately the main Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest was closed undergoing renovations, but we were still able to see the impressive buildings of the Round Alter, Hall of Fasting, Echo Wall and Imperial Vault of Heaven.

A huge park of about 267 hectares, the temples are interesting in that most of them have round rooves with square bases. Apparently this is a pattern deriving from the ancient Chinese belief that heaven was round and the earth was square.

Piers in front of one of the impressive gates at Temple of Heaven

After spending a couple of hours wandering through the park we walked out of the Park and around the corner to eat at a dumpling house. Unfortunately we discovered that it was closed, but found the Quanjude Duck Restaurant right next door. At first it looked a little tacky as it had pictures of all these famous people who had eaten there – like George Bush Senior, Yassir Arafat, Yanni etc., and the guide book didn’t give it the best review in the world, but it turned out to be pretty good. We ordered Peking duck – which the carved at our table and which was the nicest duck I’ve ever eaten, plus snow peas, beef, some dumplings and rice. It was a pretty yummy meal.

Chef carving the delicious Peking Duck


Piers and Neil with our great lunch

Piers then headed up to Tianamen while Neil and I went over to meet dad at the Pearl Market – one of his favourite places in Beijing. It has heaps of pearls as well as some clothes and touristy stuff. Of course we made some purchases, including one of the beautiful Beijing China porcelain dolls that dad is collecting and got into the local bargaining spirit a bit. I wanted to buy one of the dolls too as they are beautifully decorated and very colourful – dad maybe a present for the birthday if you can send one home!!

That night we went out of town a bit to the house of one of Dad’s colleagues for a Christmas Eve party. There was so much food there (all American type stuff – the chili was pretty good!) – and lots of Americans!

A strange site - view down one of the alleyways off the main road

posted by batik billy @ 3:39 pm