Chengde, imperial summer residence
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If you like traveling, you will like Shangrilá. A different book from trips, in which the protagonist, the author who offers you this information about Beijing, penetrates in some of the most remote regions of China. In this succession of mountains that spread to the south of Sichuan and the northwest of Yunnan, inhabited by related peoples of some form with the Tibetan culture, as the Yi, the Moso, the Naxi or the Bai. Following the track that the always damned Yi mark, it will finish bottled in the Shangrilá search. |
Chengde is a city placed to little more than 200 kilometers of Beijing that concentrates around him an incomparable number of constructions of the dynasty Qing. Possibly Chengde is, after Beijing the most monumental city of the north of China, it is due to the fact that, from 1703, when the emperor Kangxi made to construct in his surroundings the famous summer Village, it was the place chosen by a good number of emperors to escape of the oppressive summer heat of Beijing.
Chengde, called Jehol before 1949, is placed to the north of the Big Wall. Formerly it was a small village 
placed in the middle of the country manchú. Surrounded with thick forests and soft mountains, it was fulfilling all the requirements so that the illustrated emperor Kangxi, who was afraid with good reason that the culture of his people manchú was finished melting between the culture of the most numerous Chinese, was choosing it to raise his summer residence.
In the times in which Kangxi chose it to spend his summers, Chengde was famous for the fighter plenty, especially of deer, and of manchúes nomads who were marauding for the surroundings. Soon it turned therefore into a place of rest and a species of spiritual retirement, where the emperors were supported close to the foci where the ancestral culture of the manchúes was still surviving.
But his construction activity was transforming this idyllic scenery that they wanted to preserve. About the summer Town, residence of Kangxi, there were constructed temples of the different beliefs and religions, in honor of the dignitaries of the allied and vassal countries who were visiting him, and this way it went so far as to have up to eleven temples, which for being placed in the skirt of the hill that surrounds the summer Town, are known by the common name of Exterior Temples.
There are temples in honor of the Tibetan ones, of the kalmucos, of the kazakos and of the oiratos. Each one with a form and proper characteristics. The exterior Temples of Chengde are a small museum of the tendencies and religious ideas of the dynasty Qing, since in them there are mixed the religions established with the beliefs of the remote peoples.
At present the city of Chengde keeps on supporting a reasonable size, and more bearing in mind that an important part of the surface of the city is occupied by his historic monuments. Since his most interesting places concentrate on a relatively next area, it is a good opportunity to walk peacefully and to enjoy the city.
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