Summer Palace and Botanical Gardens, July 10

Welcome to the Botanical Garden!

interesting very large planter!

I am running up against my three -week travel limit and am weary and footsore. But it is also hot here, and the tourist sights are getting sameish. Today I did go to the Botanical Garden. The beds and conservatory were remarkably uninteresting and poorly maintained. But there was lots and lots of green space and people out with their babies and popup tents (many mysteriously named Quechua) enjoying the (hot and hazy) day. There was a pond with waterlilies, and many photographers with big lenses were taking pictures of what, to me, looked lovely but nothing special as waterlilies go. I can understand the impulse to seek out and grab scenes, objects, and ambiences of natural calm and beauty, especially in urban China. I wonder if it is something, like the museums on the National Mall, that most people don't really take advantage of. I sat on a nearby bench and started painting, then they were taking pictures of me too.

the Stone Boat at the Summer Palace

Pavilion for Listening to the Orioles

Later, I went to the Summer Palace. More, more, more pavilions, temples, and so on. The heat made it feel like a trudge. The famous Long Corridor had pictures of peonies, landscapes, enraged knights on horses, women making obeisance to calligraphers, etc. None of them looked special to me, but probably all were painted by someone in the last 20 or so years. The stone boat was pretty amazing. The empress spent gold and energy on that at the expense of the military and other state needs: that sort of thing makes the idea of violent revolution entirely understandable. Appropriately for a summer palace, there was a pavilion for Listening to the Orioles, with a guy selling toy baseballs and birdwhistles out front. But he wasn't shouting,  “Delicious and Nutritious!”. Of course I have pics for Will. One mother saw me sitting on a rock and had the idea of having her toddler pose with me. There were some stunningly non PC souvenirs involving picaninnies cooking each other in large black pots and grinning... who knows what they think really of  white people? I mean, we are hairier than them . . . but richer, and possessing cultural and technical capital they want . . . we must seem in some ways foolish . . . Probably mostly ambivalence, until they can feel clearly superior in all respects.