The Camel-back Bridge
B U ST as the temples and pagodas add life and beauty to the verdant w hillsides, so do the marble bridges and colorful tea houses add charm and interest to the lakeside scene. In all there are perhaps no fewer than tent picturesque bridges within the circumference of the Summer Palace walls--all of them differing videly in size and design, and all bearing a marked individuality in manner of omamention. The principle of the old adage, that "in variety is the spice of life," was evidently well understood by the old Court landscape gardeners and builders, for throughout the length and breadth of the palace grounds, aside from some of the statuary, scarcely two things of a kind can be found. Even the windows of the pavilions fronting the lake present a marvelous variety of design and color. Some of these windows are almost grotesque in their unusually odd and fantastic shapes. (See picture on page 39.] Of the bridges, perhaps the most artistic and unusual is the celebrated "Camel-back Bridge," shown in the opposite plate. This handsome structure, with its sculptured stone foundations and broad stone steps, is surmounted by glistening balustrades of polished marble, with highly-urought figures of the dragon soaring in the midst of cloud-bedecked skies on each of its sixty balusters. The Yü Tai Ch'iao, or Jade Girdle Bridge, as the Chinese call it has an archway of unusual height De did not stop to measure it, but some would tell us that it is thirty feet under the arch, and that it has a span of twentu-four feet-large enough and high enough that the great Imperial barges night pass beneath it without even lowering a mast. Amid such quiet scenes as this, the Empress Dowager and her ladies, as well as the Young Emperor himself, passed many a happy, care-free day under the azure blue of Peking skies. Truly the great Empress was guilty of no misnomer when she called this place, "The Garden of Peaceful Enjoyment." For further descriptions of interesting landmarks within the walls of the Yi Ho Yuan, see paqes 20, 38, 46, 58, 68, 80, 90, 104, 116, 178, and 130.
