Monday, September 24, 2001 – Beijing

At the Summer Palace, we walked along a long walkway, known as the Long Gallery.

The Long Gallery stretches 728 meters from the moon gate in the east to the Shizhang Pavilion in the west. It is the longest and most famous gallery in China.

The gallery has about 8000 colorful paintings, which, as the most charming part of the gallery, depict landscapes, human figures, battle scenes, flowers, birds, etc. Beautiful as these paintings are, they have to be retouched every 12 years. Till today these paintings have been renewed several times, and due to the imperfect skills of some artisans, unfortunately, much of the details and intricacies have more or less been lost.

Here we followed one of the many bridges through the Palace gardens. The water lilies were quite a sight.