The Old Summer Palace revisited

Glorious plum blossom, so pretty :)

Some of you will remember that my daughter and I visited the Old Summer Palace in 2014. This year,  after our visit to the Sacred Way we decided to re-visit the park to see some of the parts we missed.

We entered the park right next to the ruins, which are were as impressive as they were last time!

One of the first things we noticed is that walkways have been constructed all round this area. We could understand this but it does mean that you are no longer able to wander wherever you want to, which is a shame. However the ruins need to be protected, and the number of visitors must have made this step neccessary.

The beautiful ruins of the fountain, tidied up a bit since we last visited. I took a photo of my daughter leaning against the fence last time we were here, this time we weren't allowed to get any closer than this.

We had noticed on our last visit that lots of the marble blocks lying around in this area had numbers painted on them, we could understand why on this visit, as it looks like there is partial reconstruction of  some of the buildings going on.

The maze, we just had to go round this again :)

The pavilion at the centre of the maze. We couldn't find our way to the middle, but we were hampered by the hundreds of school children all eager to speak to us and ask us questions :)

Eventually a friendly Chinese man took pity on us and invited us to follow him and his family to the centre.

Looking over a quiet part of the maze from the central pagoda. 

The area in the photos above and below are obviously areas where there is a lot going on, behind these stones was a large new building full of pieces of marble, which looked as if it was the centre of the reconstruction efforts. 

We had decided to walk through the park, but this was after we had visited the Sacred Way, we were very hot and tired so we walked back to the entrance a different way, some photos of which follow:

A pretty Bridge which led to ...

a lovely little island covered in trees all showing their lovely blossom :)

A beautiful spot to take a rest, so lovely and peaceful.

These two men were busy doing maintenance on this boat, getting ready for a summer working on the lakes and rivers :)

Odd paving stones here and there, nicely decorated.

Another pretty bridge where the river meets the lake :)

Such a gorgeous colour blossom :)

A lovely gentle walk helped to revive us a bit :)

Nothing to do with the Summer Place - in the evening we went to a well known lamb restaurant, where we had scrummy lamb kebabs :) The photo above shows the ceiling in the foyer of the building :)