Chengde

The earliest tourist trip I remember. I was 6. My parents took me to Chengde and stayed in a resort for 2 days. We did a lot of hiking, which was tiring for me. We visited the huge 5-story high wooden Buddha statue in Puning Temple, the two big Tibetan style temples built to mimic the home monasteries in Tibet of Dalai and Panchen Lamas, and climbed to the base of the Sledgehammer Mountain with a huge balancing rock. The Qing dynasty emperors in 18th century built a resort here with lakes to mimic the famously beautiful Yangtze delta gardens in Suzhou, Wuxi, and Zhenjiang, then built the lavish Tibetan Buddhist temples to entertain Mongolian and Tibetan nomadic chiefs here in an effort to maintain their loyalty to the Manchu Empire, the largest empire in Chinese history.