The Summer Palace

The Summer Palace, or Garden of Nurtured Harmony, is a luxurious garden first built during the Jin Dynasty (1115-1234) to provide royal families with rest and entertainment. It contains more than 3,000 structures including pavilions, towers, bridges, corridors, gardens and a beautiful lake.

Alexia and I spent a day exploring the palace grounds today. Clusters of small buildings, porches and pagodas scattered along a sunken lakeshore provide compelling studies in the Small is Beautiful philosophy. They are living environments designed by the same principles that move traffic along their streets and people through their subways: chaos. Paths meander, walls twist and curl, and buildings seem to be ad-hoc constructions based on need and space for the immediate time and place. The final effect is one of quaintness, beauty, intimacy, peacefullness. It felt like a communal sanctuary. In one of the villages we stumbled upon a gang of old Chinese folks slowly dancing together, ballroom style, in an open room next to the river while fish swam beneath their feet and willows whispered around our ears. It was a sureal and celestial experience.

The parks and palaces here are absolutely gorgeous. Visiting one is an immersive experience that calms the mind and body and centers the spirit. The contrast to the frenzy of their daily lives of noise and dirt couldn't be more dramatic. We could sometimes hear the grumbling traffic and screaching horns when the trees cleared at the top of the mountain and it made us feel uncomfortable. The sound of so-called civilization tends to create within the natural mind embedded within nature an impression of evil and terror. The city seems to be a growing, living, breathing, firy beast that consumes the entire countryside. At times I felt like a Buddhist monk who had temporarily awoken from a hundred thousand year meditation to find, once again, the epochal destruction that stitches together the never-ending cycles of time. The horror was familiar but painful.

Such perspective and balance is often attained within sanctuaries such as parks, churches, temples and nature. Chinese civilization was once deeply reflective of the mysteries of life and steeped in wisdom traditions. Today I see greed, impatience, stylization, filth, and cheap immitation. The city exhausts a terrific stench and homeless people curl up on benches in darkened parks as glass highrises stretch into a gray haze of pollution. I am rocked by the violence of humanity debased here in Beijing and awed by a people who know they are the inheritors of our empire.

The Olympics are a great thing. It motivates nations to invest in their cities. Because Beijing is hosting the Olympics in 2008 they are expanding their subway and bus systems, cleaning their sewers and streets, legislating higher standards of cleanliness, renovating their parks and rebuilding their ancient ruins. The only complaint I have is that they charge admission to their own citizens. Their parks and palaces provide glimpses into a magnificent and noble past. They help to restore serenity and balance to the modern mind. But they are effectively off limits to the vast majority of whom are still very poor and who live in squalid conditions.

These people need historical continuity more now than at any other time in their history. I hope the financial burden of maintaining these places can be more equitably distributed as the middle class grows and capitalism takes root. Only then can they do the real work of civilized people once survival has been attained...that is, create beauty and achieve contentment.