MINORITIES PARK and LAMA TEMPLE, Beijing, China (Day 4)

Musicians, Minorities Park, Beijing

The following is an excerpt from the diary of our trip to China July, 1995.  We were traveling with three friends, spending five days in Beijing and then three days in Xian.  China has changed greatly since our visit but many of the places we went to are still among the popular tourist spots.

Beijing Day 4:  On the morning of our third full day in Beijing we were scheduled to tour the Temple of Heaven, but as we had already visited several temples, we asked to visit the Minorities Park instead.  The Minorities Park was a government enterprise and had only opened a year before.  It is a sort of Disneyland approach to bringing samples of China’s many ethnic minorities to the capital–saving tourists the trouble of traveling to the hinterlands.  It also seemed to have an educational purpose–almost the only other people there on the day we visited was a school class on a field trip.

Prayer Wheel, Minorities Park, Beijing

The park was divided into sections by ethnic group and showed houses, gardens, tools, etc.  We started at the Tibet exhibit, where for a fee you could actually go into a small temple and take photographs.  Outside was a giant prayer wheel and a row of smaller ones.  The wheels are inscribed with prayers and as you turn them the prayers are repeated.

Water Play, Minorities Park, Beijing

We then went to another area to watch a dance celebrating a water festival.  At the end of each dance the dancers and people in the audience scooped water out of tubs placed around the dance floor and threw it at one another. It was the perfect activity for a hot day and, by the end, everyone was soaked.  (Later we saw the dancers’ clothes hung on a line to dry.)

Pagoda and Water Wheels, Minorities Park

For lunch we went to a restaurant housed in what once had been an imperial room–inside it was blessedly dark and cool and the food was the best in three days.  Like each of the other restaurants we had been taken to, this apparently only catered to tourist groups.

Incense, Lama Temple

For the afternoon we went to the Lama Temple, which we thought was pretty, but not that different from other temples.  I kept sneezing when I got near incense, which was everywhere.
For an article about the Ethnic Minorities park in the NY Times, click HERE.

Lama Temple, Beijing