Zhuhai Adventures

The Gongleyuan Gardens is our local park, just past the huge fire station adjacent to our tower and turn right onto Gongle Road. The park stretches for acres and has been created around a steep hill and wooded area. It was once the property of Tang Shaoyi who was made first Premier of the Chinese Republic in 1912 ending the Qing Dynasty. Tang had a western education and was widely travelled making him an excellent international ambassador for the new Republic. Later in his career during friendly negotiations with Japan he must have been considered a little too forthcoming by the new regime and sadly he was ‘anonymously’ assassinated whilst living in Shanghai. Rob and I were able to discover much of this interesting history as Tang’s house is now a museum within the park and can be found at the top of one of the many paths that lead up the hill.
We enter the park on the Gongle Road and firstly follow a children’s route that educates them all about recycling, not dropping litter and taking care of the environment. Soon we are passing some beautiful lakes, where lotus flowers flourish; every part of this plant is beautiful, from the flowers to the seed head, to the attractive leaves that even look striking as they decay into a ‘skeleton’. I’ve been reading a novel ‘Lady Tan’s Circle of Women’ by Lisa See- set in 15th Century China it describes foot binding in detail- in this dreadful practice the height of perfection was thought to be when the woman’s foot is shaped like a Lotus bud.
On each small lake there are crooked bridges, more like low decking across the water with a series of sharp angled turns, often with a beautiful pagoda in the centre for the visitor to rest and enjoy the view out of the hot sun. Rob tells me that traditionally these bridges are built crooked because it protects against evil ghosts who can only walk in straight lines. We admire the lake for some time and take a welcome break from the sapping heat of the sun. We marvel as small droplets of water are rocked by the wind inside the lotus leaves, and I message my daughters please name your first child ‘dancing water’- they quite rightly send a laughing emoji back.
We walk up the hill through shady glades of trees, they are all labeled but I’m too hot to get my translate app out- amongst the ones we recognise are acacia, bamboo, a variety of pines and banyans. There are beautiful flowers all around us and Rob points out that many of the plants look like giant versions of UK houseplants.
On top of the hill we come to a small cafe, it must have been one of Tang’s summer houses – the young baristas make us an amazingly artistic cappuccino, and we enjoy the cool of the air-conditioned interior for a while. Outside is a small pond full of goldfish and turtles, as we approach, they start to swim towards us, even the sunbathing turtles throw themselves recklessly into the water and come over, oh dear they think we have food, we apologise and leave them floundering together hungrily.
Beside the pond is a courtyard with many decorative plant pots full of bonsai trees, many different varieties all perfectly minitiarised and at the centre a Banyan that has been minitiarised to the size of an ornamental tree. We come to realise that bonsai displays are traditionally placed outside most courtyards and temples, and we see these arrangements again many times throughout the town of Tangjia.
Following a path to the ‘Pagoda of Panoramic Views’, we finally make it to the very top of the hill. The notice we read tells us that we can see: the mountains to the North of Zhuhai, the City of Shenzhen, the sea to the East and Lantau Island Hong Kong. We hope that Tang and his family enjoyed this panorama as they sat in this pagoda in the 1920’s- but the beautiful gardens that he created have prospered and all that we can see now are full grown trees and flowers, but we don’t mind, it is a very restful and shady place. Then we spot another sign low down in the grass, we don’t need to translate as the picture very clearly shows a snake in a yellow warning triangle. We decide it is time to climb back down the hill and head home, making a lot of noise as we go.