Day 1 (Saturday): Puning Temple (普寧寺) & the Mountain Resort (承德避暑山莊),

We joined a two days and one night self-guide tour to Chengde, which is a prefecture-level city in Hebei province (河北省), situated northeast of Beijing. It is best known as the site of the Mountain Resort (承德避暑山莊), a vast imperial garden formerly used by the emperors of the Qing Dynasty. Our bus started @ 08:00 and it took three and a half hour to reach our destination. After checking into the hotel (倚望樓賓館) I’d say a one star hotel but conveniently located just next to the Resort. After a quick lunch at the nearby side street (fried dumpling, noodle and congee for RMB16) we took a 15-minute ride to the Puning Temple (普寧寺) @ 13:00. The temple was built in 1755, which houses the world's tallest wooden statue (22.28米高重110噸) of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara (金漆木雕千手千眼觀音菩薩). At 14:45 we departed for the Chengde Mountain Resort. The whole mountain resort covers an area 5,640,000 square meters. It is the largest royal garden in China. The wall of the mountain resort is over 10,000 meters in length. The project of building Chengde Mountain Resort started in 1703 and finished in 1790. In summers, emperors of Qing Dynasty came to the mountain resort to relax themselves and escape from the high temperature in Beijing. The whole Resort can be divided into three areas which are lakes area, plains area and hills area. The lakes area, which includes 8 lakes, covers an area of 496,000 square meters. The plains area covers an area of 607,000 square meters. The emperors held horse races and hunted in the area. The largest area of the three is the hills area. It covers an area of 4,435,000 square meters. Hundreds of palaces and temples were built on the hills in this area. We spent an hour and a half sightseeing the main villa area which was dull and the place rather moribund. The lake and plain areas got better vista but it’s getting late. So we went to the nearby town area for dinner at a Mongolian Restaurant (巴特) which by the way was quite good.


Camera Equipment:
Camera: Nikon D3 & F6 plus Panasonic LX3
Lens: AFS 17-35/f2.8 (mostly on F6) and AFS 70-200/f2.8 (D3)
Singh-Ray Filters: i) Gold N Blue Polarizer, ii) LB Color Combo Polarizer, iii) Daryl Benson ND-3 Reverse Graduate and iv) Galen Rowell ND-3G Hard Step.
Film (for F6): 8 rolls of Kodak Ektar and 1 roll of Fujicolor – all 100 ISO

NB: Photos without metadata were taken by Nikon F6, the film camera