Summer Palace and Beihai Park

10/9/2010

I remember first learning about the Summer Palace and Empress Dowager Cixi in ninth grade. The story went that the Dowager, ruler of the Qing Dynasty in the late 19th century, took the money that was supposed to be used to build modern ships for China's navy and instead built an ornate stationary marble boat in the Summer Palace. Because of this, the Qing was not able to stand up against foreign countries, and as result China was carved into various spheres of influences. It's a very simplistic story. In reality, China failed to fend off foreign countries for bigger reasons, and the Qing, the last dynasty of China, soon fell for bigger reasons. But the story stayed with me because of the irony and because of the Dowager's destructive vanity.

Here are some pictures of the Summer Palace, the former imperial garden of the Qing:

water calligraphy

the man-made Kunming Lake

I tried getting this from the side so you can see that that facial hair is no mustache--it's pure nose hair

See? Below the nose is a slight mustache, protruding directly from the nose are those bracket-shaped nose hairs

Okay so the following might be a little controversial. Let me defend myself. First, Huggies features a baby's butt on its homepage. Second, this is educational:
In China, many of the babies do not wear diapers. Their pants are split (and so called "split pants") so, wherever they are, they can squat to relieve themselves. And you thought dog shit is a problem. China has over 265 million newborns to fourteen-year-olds. (FYI America's entire population? 307 million) If that population is equally divided up, there would be 57 million newborns to three-year-olds who would need to wear diapers. Split pants are lower in cost and more environmentally friendly than diapers. But it is uncomfortable to be confronted, frequently and without warning, with children's private parts. It is even more uncomfortable to photograph it. So yes, I feel weird.