Beidaihe: Chinese leadership retreat like a genteel English seaside resort with armed sentries
- A Gothic McDonald’s, onion domes, quaint 1920s villas – the seaside town known as the summer retreat of Communist Party leaders is a curious architectural mix
- A magnet for migratory birds as well as people, and hence a haunt of birdwatchers, a visit can be combined with one to the eastern extremities of the Great Wall
Measured as the crow flies, the main section of the Great Wall of China built in the Ming dynasty stretches some 2,000 kilometres from west to east. For much of its length, the wall dips and climbs through mountain ranges, until at last it drops to a narrow coastal plain, crosses the town of Shanhaiguan – Pass Between Mountain and Sea – and ends at the shoreline of the Bohai Sea.
Now picture the crow flying southwest from Shanhaiguan. The coastal plain widens, the mountains are lost from view, until, after 30 kilometres, there is a place where outcrops of granite form low hills and headlands. Small bays cradle beaches, which helped make this place China’s most famous seaside resort – Beidaihe (strictly speaking it’s called Beidaihe Haibin, meaning Beidaihe-by-the-Sea).
These hills and headlands, woods and estuaries, also make Beidaihe a hotspot for migratory birds, among them crows, cranes, storks, eagles, thrushes and warblers, including several rare species. It was these birds that first drew me to the town, as leader of an expedition to study bird migration at Beidaihe 40 years after observations by a Danish scientist, Axel Hemmingsen. Since then I have made at least 10 repeat visits.
That first expedition was in spring 1985, and China and Beidaihe were very different to today. Horses pulled cartloads of bricks and other materials through the streets, cars were scarce, and many people still aspired to own a bicycle, like the gearless Flying Pigeon brand cycles we used for exploring the town and nearby. But profound changes were under way as a result of China's reform process, and Beidaihe was enjoying a resurgence as a resort for the masses.
The unifier of China, Qin Shi Huangdi (221-210 BC), had a palace at Beidaihe, but its origins as a resort date from around 1890, when British engineers working on a nearby railway line recognised its potential for seaside holidays, and let friends in nearby Tianjin know. Soon, Westerners began arriving, some of them building houses and later holiday villas. In 1898, the Qing government formally declared Beidaihe a summer resort.
