Day 24 (3 August) Summer Palace, Olympic Village and the home of Madame Sun Yat Sen
August 3rd 2014 Today was another long but wonderful day. We were collected at 9am and driven to the Summer Palace, the private garden home for the emperor. This private estate and garden covering 600 acres (again Big!) was built during the reign of the Manchus (Qing) period. It was started by the third emperor Qian Long. This was a very powerful period when he started opening China to the west. The emperor built
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For centuries China stood as a leading civilization, outpacing the rest of the world in the arts and sciences, but in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the country was beset by civil unrest, major famines, military defeats, and foreign occupation. A... ... read more 
