This past Thursday China celebrated a holiday known as Duanwu Jie （端午节， pronounced dwon-woo-j-yeah). Duanwu Jie has its origins in a story about a poet named Qu Yuan (pronounced choo-you-an) who lived during the time known as the Warring-States Period. The Warring States was a time in which there were seven separate Chinese kingdoms fighting against each other for dominance. When the Chu kingdom, the one Qu Yuan lived in, was taken over by the kingdom of Qin, Qu drowned himself in a river perhaps for fear of what was to come for the people of Chu. The story goes that villagers near the river then raced out in boats to retrieve him, which explains the tradition of dragon boat racing that takes place during Duanwu Jie. Duanwu Jie is also celebrated by eating these snacks made of rice and other ingredients wrapped in some sort of plant leaf and tied up with a string. I’ve heard one explanation for this and read a different one on Wikipedia. The one I heard is that the villagers, after Qu committed suicide, wrapped these rice snacks in leaves and put them in the river for Qu’s spirit to eat; the leaves were meant to prevent fish in the river from eating the snacks. The explanation I read, however, was that the villagers put the rice snacks in the river so that the fish would eat the rice instead of Qu’s body. Either way, I figure someone or something is going to have a hard time untying the string, whether the attempt is made with a fin or with a ghostly hand. Then of course eating the food won’t be any easier.

So Thursday and Friday were vacation days in China. Arthur (that’s just his English name, of course), the Chinese guy that I’m teaching English, had work off and he invited me to go with him to Chengde (pronounced Chung-duh), a city north of Beijing where the Qing dynasty emperors used to go during the summer and enjoy its pleasant weather and scenery. It’s a few hours drive from Beijing and since the highway that connects Chengde to Beijing is close to Arthur’s apartment he let me stay over the night before we left. Before we left the following morning, I happened to notice a calendar hanging on the wall in the living room. The calendar was military-themed and so each month a different weapon or military vehicle was featured. But along with showing the various weapons and vehicles used by the Chinese military, each one was set in some sort of attractive, natural scenery; a military truck in the Inner Mongolian grasslands; a sniper rifle set upon a rock at sunset with autumnal leaves in the background; a tank in the Tibetan highlands (that one probably didn’t require any cropping).

We set off at around 7 in the morning and made it to Chengde in about three hours. After first going to the hotel, Arthur insisted that we have a tour guide take us to the various sites of the city. We started off by going to the Emperor’s palace, where the tour guide would explain things and then I would almost inevitably require Arthur to translate for me. The palace was much the same as most other historical sites I’ve visited here so far; tons of people and with a good number of cheap souvenir stores and the occasional theme park-like attractions. This one had paddleboats on the lake behind the palace and even a small amusement park with rides and bumper cars. There was one thing at the palace that I haven’t seen before, though, and that was a small population of deer allowed to roam freely within the grounds. Tourists would go up to the deer and feed them snacks out of their hands. Apparently there are quite a few deer in the area, enough to give cause for one of the souvenir stores to sell different deer parts, some of which are supposed to be health giving while others are thought to bring good luck. The store also had a stand with a few vats of alcohol with various deer parts soaking in them. I was offered a very small, free sample and drank it down. Nothing too special about it, though; it was simply good-ol’ Baijiu (pronounced buy-joe), the hard-alcohol drink of choice in China.

After we finished up our tour of the palace, we proceeded on to a Taoist temple not far from there. The temple, like the palace, had its fair share of small shops, except in these one could buy small souvenirs along with incense that you can then burn at the altars located throughout the temple. Arthur bought some incense and then went to one of the altars to pray. Neatly placed in front of every altar is a box with a glass front and a slit in the top where visitors can put money in the hopes that their donations will bring good fortune. And if you don’t feel confident by putting money in the box, you could always go to one of the fortune-tellers that were sitting in each of the temple halls. While we were there one fortune-teller succeeded in getting one visitor pay money to have him hit two sticks together for a few minutes while using a high, official sounding voice and then tell the woman what was the future had in store. As we were about to exit we came to the temple’s final shop. The walls were lined with hundreds of statuettes of an old Chinese general who is believed to be a harbinger of good fortune. The majority of the statuettes had small note cards placed in front of them with the name, address, and phone number of a temple-goer who had paid the one yuan per day price of reserving one of the figurines.

We left the temple and went back to the hotel for a while. Afterwards, we made our way out in the rain, which had begun that afternoon, to a restaurant that was purported to have Chengde-style food. After getting to the restaurant and looking over the menu, we realized Chengde-style food simply meant dishes with deer meat, all of which were quite expensive. You could actually buy the entire deer for 38,000 yuan or about $5,600. I would’ve liked to see them serve one up but nobody in the restaurant that I could see ordered one.

The next morning we met up with our tour guide from the previous day and headed back out, this time to a Chinese-style Buddhist temple. Like the Taoist temple we visited the previous day, almost every prayer hall had a donation box placed in front of the prayer mats where people would kneel and pray.

One thing that was interesting about this place was that the first part was constructed using Chinese-style architecture and the second in Tibetan. It was built this way because the Tibetan officials who came to meet with the Qing dynasty officials preferred to meet in Chengde rather than Beijing. Officials from Mongolia and Xinjiang province in Western China also preferred Chengde as a meeting spot.

After the temple we went on to our last stop of the trip: Chengde’s mini-Potala. If you’ve ever seen any pictures of Lhasa in Tibet, the Potala is the palace sitting up on a hill that overlooks the city. Although it doesn’t look exactly like the one in Lhasa, the mini-Potala in Chengde does look quite similar. As we walked up to the temple we passed through a large gate with five small towers on the top. Our tour guide explained to us that the five towers represented the five parts of the body that touch the ground when praying (knees, hands, and forehead). When the emperor came to the temple to pray, he could not kneel and pray because such an act would be beneath him. So instead, he would simply walk through the gate with the five towers and this counted the same as if he had kneeled down to pray. This made me wonder: why would the emperor come to pray at all if he was already so far above the Buddhist traditions he couldn’t even reduce himself to kneel down? Indeed, the emperor was thought to be the son of heaven and so he was believed to have divine powers. I suspect it must have been more of a formality rather than the emperor actually praying for whatever assistance Buddhism might have to offer.

Inside the palace were more prayer halls, a few rooms that had some old Tibetan tapestries, and an exhibit on the history of the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia. We made our way to the top of the palace and looked down from the roof over the surrounding area. The countryside there was beautiful and I can very much see why the Qing emperors wanted to go there during the summer. Not only was the scenery nice, it had to be ten to twenty degrees cooler there than it was in Beijing when we left.

As our tour guide tried to hurry us along to the exit we stopped off in a few more exhibit rooms. We looked through these briefly and then came to a small prayer hall with some Buddhist monks standing around. Our tour guide warned us that they would start telling us fortunes and that we should simply ignore anything they said and not pay them for their services. Sure enough, upon our entering the room one of the monks immediately began to force onto Arthur his future life like someone on the street in a city might start washing your car windshield without asking you. Arthur didn’t let the guy tell him too much before we turned around and left. Afterwards, Arthur told me the monk had, somehow, actually told Arthur the correct month of his birth date. Neither of us were sure how the monk did this. One possible explanation, of course, is that he simply guessed right. Another one is that our tour guide, who works with the hotel we were staying at and so has at least a possible connection to our personal information, may have informed him ahead of time. No matter how it came about, Arthur and I were sure the monk got tipped off somehow.

We left the palace, dropped off our tour guide back in town, and headed back towards Beijing. The drive back took us through some beautiful countryside, which I didn’t know existed so close to Beijing. It would have been nice to go somewhere with fewer crowds but, still, it was good to get out of the big city for a couple days.