Visiting The New Yuan Ming Palace, Zhuhai.

We got out of the taxi, saw the dragon, and Keith was all "We're not paying 240 yuan to look at crap!" and immediately tried to hail another taxi to get out of there.

The Entrance to The New Yuan Ming Palace.

"It isn't like there's a lot else to do in Zhuhai." I cautioned, holding him back.  "Besides, crap can be a lot of fun."

"Not at 120 yuan a person!" Keith grumped.

"But it's important history!" I countered.

"It isn't. It's just a reproduction." Keith grumped even louder.

So we stood there, on that platform, in front of the offending dragon, arguing back and forth for over five minutes, but finally Keith agreed not to pre-judge and we got ourselves tickets.

And we didn't regret it.

But, honestly, it's not a good welcome, folks, that plastic dragon. I mean, look:

Those are yellow plastic roses 

in a wire mesh base.

Truly, truly vile.

However, this dragon isn't a fair indication of what's inside the gates of The New Yuan Ming Palace, although it isn't not either. Yes, there's a heap of crap in there but there's also much that is fine and beautiful and well worth seeing.

Those gardens .... mmmmm, yes ... those gardens! I mean, look:

Only the smallest sample of the beauty.

I want to have all this at home.

In there are thousands of acres of the most amazing gardens. That alone is worth the entry price.

And they have these achingly beautiful walkways:

I want to have these in my home too.

And how can you not love this view:

Mmmmm! 

Or the Island in the Centre of the Lake:

The Island of Perpetual Immortality, 
or something. 

Or the Poet Laureate's Residence:

 I could live here!

Besides ... this place is so historical and important: a to-scale copy of the Yuanmingyuan; The Emperor's Summer Palace in Beijing; The Palace of Perfect Brightness; the legendary once-glorious Xanadu that was burned to the ground and looted of over 13 million treasures by the British and French during The Opium Wars, over 140 years ago.  And here you can actually see it; you can SEE what was lost during that hideous act of political vandalism.  Tangible ... Physical ... Proof! Surely, that alone is worth the entry fee.

But I must tell you, in fairness, that there's so much wrong with the NEW Yuanmingyuan. Seriously wrong. Truly, those folk need to sit down and rethink what they're doing here. And I think they should start by realising what a treasure they have and start to actually LIKE the place.

I think that's the real problem.  It isn't just the lack of taste, refinement and flair in the folk who run it, it's that, in the 13 years since it was built, they've never had anyone on the staff who actually LOVES the place.

And they should start to be clever with promoting what they have too. I mean, why is a place so glorious so empty?  This has to change. Like, maybe they could even let the place be used in films and commercials; something they refuse to permit now.  And, like, why?

And how outrageous is this? At the hotel, when we went to get the calligraphy to show the taxi driver where we wanted to go, not a single person among the desk staff had ever HEARD of The New Yuan Ming Palace.  I mean, here's a city with nothing else for tourists to do - apart from a mad dash over the border to Macau - and the hotel staff don't even know their little city has this one glorious attraction.

You'd think that would be the first thing anyone with the smallest sense of public relations and self-promotion would do: give the staff of tourist hotels an orientation tour of your place so they will then promote it for you. But no. Not here.  Outrageous, la?

And look at me!  Already so angry and I haven't even taken you through the gates and into the place.

Deep breath! Focus, Denise!

OK, let's do this: through those gates, the first things you see are these honeys:

You know what they are, don't you?  

Yes, these are reproductions of the three beheaded heads China has so far managed to get back from Europe's looting of the palace.  You recall the hoo-ha China created when Yves Saint Laurent's rat's head came on the market?  Well, that was the fourth in this set of twelve and China is determined to one-day retrieve all of them.  I respect and admire this aim, I really do, although I must say they aren't going about it in a way that endears anyone to them! Definitely!

And now I'm cross again.  Deep breath! ... Right! And inside The New Yuan Ming Palace, you can actually see a reproduction of the fountain they were all looted from:

The twelve Chinese Zodiac animals 

as they were 150 years back.

Let me see if I can find image of the original:

Found lots but can't figure how to download them into here!  However, here's a link to one so you can see it for yourself.  And ... isn't that the strangest looting you've ever seen? I mean, look in the foreground.  Those are Chinese musicians tootling away on flutes!  Like, why?  Too weird for words.

And showing you this fountain means I've taken you almost to the end of this journey and I now don't feel much like going back and filling in the rest. THAT was a mistake!  

However, I will tell you about this palace.  It was built much later;  long after the Ming Dynasty, which built the original Yuanmingyuan, was over, one of the Qing Emperors asked visiting groups of Europeans what their palaces looked like, so, like true diplomats, they all pooled their resources and built him one, designed by the truly great sino-Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione.

And this is what it looked like:

Euro-Sino Relations made manifest!

And, these days, whenever you see images of The Summer Palace in Beijing, this is usually all you ever find, so you just presume The Qing Emperors lived in a Western-style palace, but they didn't.  This was more like their "Disney-world-palace" where they only dropped by occasionally, usually to meet and greet with Occidental-types. The rest of the time, they either lived in Beijing proper, or they chose one of the other 39 palaces they had on their massive, massive estate.

By the way, The New Yuan Ming Palace only has 18 of the original 40 different palaces and gardens in here:

 The layout.

Keith points to "We are here!"

They wanted to build all 40 but when they reached 18 Zhuhai said "No.  Any more and you're creating environmental damage." and, you know, I suspect it was because Zhuhai didn't let Beijing have its way, that's what started all the resentment and thus the lack of care they now take of the existing sites.

However, I'm only guessing about this, although I do have to add that, if they can't even handle care and maintenance on 18 of them, what chance did they have with more than twice that number?

But back to this visit.  For the entry price, you get to see things more sublime than you can possibly imagine ...

 Look, Lois! Two tings!

... and others that are ...

 The Imperial Waterslide.

What can I possibly say about 

this tragic piece of plastic ?

... frankly crap!

Although crap really is in the eye of the beholder.  Like when Keith saw this enormous statue in "The Imperial Wedding Photo Garden" he said "That is more crappy than I can stand" ...

... whereas I saw the masterful hand of our Dafen-friend Ianbo of Bison Art and was thrilled to see something he'd obviously made so far from home.  Although, yes, Keith is right and it is crap, but that wouldn't be Lanbo's fault. He's obviously just made up something another person came up with, and just look at how beautifully wrought it is.

Oh, and speaking of crap, we went to one of the Classical Chinese Music shows!  Keith planned to film it for the music department at his school but switched the camera off within nano-seconds. Yes, it was that bad.  We instantly named the band "Five Very Fine Classical Musicians and A Middle-Aged Lady Who Hits Things with Sticks". These things:

For the first few numbers, she hit the bits on the musical instrument-thingy front-right. And then, later, she got a bigger stick and hit those enormous gongs in the back. And I couldn't work out if she needed to be wearing glasses and was hitting the wrong bits, or if it was just that her timing was so bad it sounded wrong.

 
This isn't just me being a fuss-pot either. Children and grumpy old men were running out with their hands over their ears, and you should have seen the frustration on the musicians faces. I'll have to ask Keith to download the footage into here so you have some idea of how TRAGIC it was.

And since we were neither children nor grumpy old men, we were forced to sit there for nearly an hour and with forced smiles on our faces too because the remaining audience, very ashamed, was watching to see how we were taking it and we were desperately trying not to be rude.

Afterwards we decided that Middle-Aged Lady's husband got her the job so he could sneak off each afternoon to meet his mistress.  There could be no other reason.  Oh, those poor, poor musicians.

And so we decided to skip the next show "The Seeding of the Concubines" yet when we heard it off in the distance we were cursing because it sounded so genuinely beautiful.  That Middle-Aged Lady's husband mustn't have wanted to spend a long time each afternoon with that mistress and so the Musicians were free to ... well, make music!

And I think that's all I can tell you about visiting the place, although ... 

... no, wait, I do have a story of something that happened here.  It was all very weird and I originally decided not to mention it to anyone apart from Keith, but then I did and it started a discussion and everyone had opinions and I'm so contrary I decided it was all a trick of the light, and ... well, let me tell you what happened and you can decide what you think.

It happened in the section known as The Wife Waiting Wall:

See up there? On the left? That's a reproduction of the wall in Beijing where soldiers wives would wait to watch their husbands return from battle, the idea being that, if you didn't see your husband's banner, you were supposed to abseil-without-ropes off the side.

Anyway, Keith suggested we go up to take a look and he cruelly snapped a photo of me saying "Those are steps. I don't do steps. You go.  This wife is waiting right here."

And so he set off alone ...

... while I'm waiting below being all civilised and unsweaty.

So I'm sitting there, quietly smoking and looking through the photos, despairing because they were all so dark, when something odd catches my eye.  I'm now telling myself it was a trick of the light, but I definitely saw something strange and white and misty come out of the goddess statue who watches over this place ...

 Richard has cruelly named her "Farty" 

because she is lifting a cheek 

and has a relieved look on her face. 

Everyone else simply and more politely

calls her Lady Buddha.

... and drift with what definitely looked like determination and purpose off down the path to the left. My left!  The statue's right!

 
Naturally, I instantly grab my camera to take a photo but it was dead, so I'm frantically racing to change the battery, all the while thinking "Bloody typical!  Here I see a Goddess Ghost, I can't get proof, and now no one will ever believe me!"

And, yes, it was gone by the time I'd changed the battery so I scampered off in the direction it'd gone and saw this ...

Do these guys look like 

they've just seen a ghost?

If the strange shape had followed the same trajectory, it would have passed right in front of these bored-looking fellows, and I wondered how they hadn't seen it and was going to ask ...

 
... but then I remembered that awful and fraught conversation I tried to have in Vietenne in Laos with the hotel staff about the whatever-that-thing-was that kept pulling off my bedsheets and I thought "There's a conversation I'm never going to have again!" so I left these guys to their own business and, after stomping around, looking and seeing nothing, went back to "The Wife Waiting Place" to wait for Keith.

And then it came back.  Yes, it came back again, traveling the same path it left by.  And this time I was ready, the camera worked and here is the shot I took:

And then it seemed like it merged again with the statue and it was over.

I'm sitting there stunned and thinking "Ghost? Angel? Goddess on a toilet break?" and also about how it looked nothing like the goddess it appeared to be inhabiting.  In fact, it looked more like your regular Kwan Yin statue ...

 Kwan Yin, Goddess of Mercy, 

She Who Hears the Tears of the World,

this statue seen at Bao Mo Gardens in Guangzhou.

... or else an older version of The Spirit of Poetry back at the Poet Laureate's Residence:

Anyway, when Keith got back and I told him, his first response was "Maybe it's the ghost of one of the widows who leapt from the wall." 

What can you say to that except "Duh! No widows! The entire place is a reproduction.  Even that goddess is a reproduction." 

And when I showed him the photo he regained his senses and decided it was most likely some kid we couldn't see off in the distance someplace playing games with a mirror.  

Yeah, kinda possible.

But you must admit this entire episode was very, very odd and such an "Only to Denise" thing to happen!

So, what do you make of it?

Anyway, that's the story about visiting The New Yuan Ming Palace in Zhuhai.  Lots of good stuff. Lots of bad stuff. Lots of strange stuff. Lots of unmitigated crap. Needs lots more love and attention but all told a truly lovely way to spend a day.

So, if you're in Zhuhai, race yourself over there quick-smart.  And if you're not, why don't you simply look at the two nano-films we made from our photos and imagine yourself there.

Worth the entry price?

Very, very definitely.