Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
gets fearsomely busy. If you need to get some souvenir
shopping
done in a
hurry, this is the place to come, though watch out for tea scam artists (see p.34).
You'll have to bargain hard, except at the large jewellery shops, where gold and
platinum pieces are sold by weight, and the price per gram - significantly lower
than in the West - is marked on the wall. Wooden signs point to the more
famous shops (see p.139).
A classical Chinese garden featuring pools, walkways, bridges and rockeries,
the
Yu Gardens
(Yu Yuan or Jade Garden; daily 8.30am-5.30pm; ¥40) were
created in the sixteenth century by a high-ranking official in the imperial
court in honour of his father. Despite fluctuating fortunes, the gardens have
surprisingly survived the passage of the centuries. They were spared from their
greatest crisis - the Cultural Revolution - apparently because the anti-imperi-
alist “Little Sword Society” had used them as their headquarters in 1853 during
the Taiping Uprising (see p.177). The Yu Gardens are less impressive than the
gardens of nearby Suzhou (see p.153), but given that they predate the relics of
the International Settlement by some three centuries, the Shanghainese are
understandably proud of them. During the lantern festival on the fifteenth day
of the traditional New Year, the gardens are brightened up by thousands of
lanterns and an even larger number of spectators.
Garden connoisseurs will appreciate the whitewashed walls topped by
undulating dragons made of tiles, the lotus ponds full of koi and the paths
winding round hillocks. The first building you come to is the
Cuixiu Hall
(Hall of Gathering Grace), built as a venue for the appreciation of an impressive
twelve-metre-high
rockery
; Chinese gardens are meant to be landscapes in
miniature, so the rockery is something of a mini-Himalaya. The
Yuhua Tang
(Hall of Jade Magnificence) behind it has some lovely wooden screens on the
doors and inside is full of Ming dynasty rosewood furniture. The huge, craggy,
indented rock in front of the hall was intended for the Summer Palace in
Beijing, but the boat carrying it sank in the Huangpu, so it was recovered and
installed here. Chinese guides demonstrate that a coin dropped in the hole at
the top can emerge from several different exits - according, so they say, to your
astrological sign. The southeast section of the gardens is a self-contained
miniature garden
within a garden and tends to be rather less busy, so it's a
good place to head for a sit down.
After visiting the gardens, check out the delightful
Huxin Ting
(Heart of Lake
Pavilion; 8am-9pm), a two-storey teahouse on an island at the centre of an
ornamental lake, reached by a zigzagging bridge. The Queen of England and Bill
Clinton, among other illustrious guests, have dropped in for tea. These days it's a
bit pricey at ¥50 for a cup of tea (albeit limitless), but you're welcome to poke
about. Vendors on the bridge sell fish food for ¥2 so you can feed the carp.
The alleyways
A short walk west from the Yu Gardens, the
Chenxiangge Nunnery
(daily
8am-4pm; ¥10) is one of the more active of Shanghai's temples. This tranquil
complex is enlivened by the presence of a few dozen resident nuns, who gather
twice daily to pray and chant in the Daxiongbao Hall, u in der the gaze of the
Sakyamuni Buddha. His gilded statue is flanked by images of 384 disciples, all
supposedly the work of a single recent, still living, craftsman. As in all Chinese
nunneries, the gardens are extremely well tended.
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