Chengde

Before the Qing there was little here but a scatter of hamlets in a valley on the Wulie River, beyond the Great Wall's inner line and on the road to the Mongol grasslands. The Kangxi emperor changed that in 1703, when he began building a summer palace on the site, partly to escape the heat of Beijing and partly to keep the court close to the hunting grounds at Mulan, where the Manchu banners practised the riding and archery on which the dynasty's self-image rested.

The Bishu Shanzhuang, the Mountain Resort for Escaping the Heat, grew over some ninety years into a walled park of lakes, meadows, hills and dozens of pavilions, borrowing the look of famous gardens from the south and the tents and grassland of the north. Kangxi and later Qianlong spent months of most years here, conducting business, receiving Mongol princes and Tibetan clergy, and in 1793 meeting the British embassy under Lord Macartney. Around the park the emperors built the temples now called the Eight Outer Temples, in Tibetan and Mongolian styles, as a political gesture towards the peoples of the frontier as much as a religious one.

Decline followed the dynasty's own. The Jiaqing emperor died at the resort in 1820, and the Xianfeng emperor died here in 1861 after fleeing Beijing during the Second Opium War; the court then largely abandoned the place, and buildings rotted or were dismantled. Chengde spent the 20th century as a provincial town, and as capital of Jehol province it was taken by the Japanese army in 1933 and annexed to Manchukuo. Restoration began in earnest after 1949, and in 1994 the resort and the surrounding temples were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Chengde's culture is a frontier mixture, and the temples are its clearest expression. Tibetan Buddhism was the faith the Qing used to bind Mongol and Tibetan allies, and the monasteries above the town were built to make that visible: Tibetan whitewashed walls and trapezoidal windows, Chinese glazed roofs and imperial tablets, and inscriptions in Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian and Tibetan on the same stele. Several remain working monasteries, with monks, butter lamps and morning chanting.

The Manchu and Mongol presence lasted beyond the court. Chengde's prefecture contains Manchu and Mongol autonomous counties, and their names, foods and family histories are part of local identity, although daily life is thoroughly Mandarin-speaking. The imperial hunt at Mulan, north of the city, is remembered in local festivals, horse riding on the grasslands and the game dishes that restaurants advertise.

As a small city that has lived on its monuments for decades, Chengde is used to visitors but not overwhelmed by them outside holiday weeks. Residents treat the resort partly as a public park — morning exercise, fishing on the lakes in season, families walking under the willows — and the temples as neighbourhood landmarks. Paper-cutting and shadow puppetry belong to the wider Hebei tradition, and the opera styles heard on festival days are the same bangzi forms sung across the province.

The prefecture of Chengde covers a large area of mountain country with around three million people, while the built-up city along the valley holds a few hundred thousand. Constrained by ridges on both sides, it is a long, narrow city of apartment blocks stacked up the slopes, with the imperial park occupying a substantial share of the flat ground.

Tourism is the best-known industry but not the largest. The surrounding counties farm maize, chestnuts, mushrooms and fruit; there is mining and steel-related industry in the wider prefecture; and Chengde's role as a water catchment for Beijing and Tianjin has brought restrictions on polluting activities along with investment in forestry. The Saihanba plantation to the north, a vast forest grown on former wasteland since the 1960s, is a point of pride locally and nationally.

Life moves at a small-city pace. Mornings start with exercise in the park and breakfast of soy milk and fried dough; the markets are busiest early; evenings bring square dancing beside the river. Winters are long and heating runs for months, so social life moves indoors. Young people leave for Beijing, an hour away by fast train, which has made the city both more connected and more prone to losing its graduates; weekend visitors from the capital are a steady source of income for hotels and restaurants.

The cooking is northern Hebei food shaped by hills and a short growing season: wheat, buckwheat, millet, chestnuts, potatoes and mutton rather than rice and fish. Noodles and flatbreads are everyday staples, often with a sauce of soybean paste or a thin mutton stew, and buckwheat is used for noodles, pancakes and a cold jelly dressed with vinegar and garlic.

The city advertises an imperial-hunting inheritance, and restaurant menus list venison, pheasant and other game alongside wild mushrooms, day lilies and mountain herbs gathered in the surrounding forests. Chestnuts from the Yanshan hills are a regional speciality, roasted in sugar and sand in winter or cooked with chicken; local jujube dates and hawthorn appear as snacks, preserves and the sugar-glazed skewers sold on the street.

Breakfast and snacking are where Chengde is most distinctive. Xingren cha, a thick sweet almond gruel, is drunk from a bowl on cold mornings; pancake rolls, fried dough twists, sesame flatbreads and small steamed buns fill out the stalls near the markets. Mutton skewers grilled over charcoal and copper-pot hotpot suit the climate, and the drinks are beer, jujube wine and the strong clear grain spirits common across the north.