New Summer Palace - scenery

There's a beautiful lake in the middle of the Summer Palace and a 17-arch bridge that's very famous. Unfortunately the weather wasn't that great, but you still get a good idea of the splendour of the place.
A rock courtyard. Chinese people love these rocks that have many holes in them. I once heard that the "uglier" the rock the more value it had in the Chinese way of thinking...
A decorative gate. Yosuke and Meng Jiu Sheng are down on the bottom left.
A view from a pagoda on the man-made hill at the north side of the park.
Same view but close up. Large boats in the ancient style (seen to the right) carry passengers from one side of the lake to the other.
Yosuke.
Some impressive architecture by the North End of the park.

I'm taking a distance education course on the social history of modern China and there's this one phrase from one of my readings that I enjoyed: "...to purchase everything needed for the morning and evening meals means the members of the family will merely sit and eat. Is this the way things should be?" The moral of the story: you should work in the fields and eat what you harvest and have made on your own. This of course questions the way our modern society works, but I can tell you, that in my present position, I can't imagine spending half of my day toiling in my fields and preparing my own food. It'd be impossible. "Purchasing everything needed" and "merely sitting and eating" is my fate.