Longqingxia Scenic Area

Longqingxia Scenic Area in Beijing opens a thousand years ago, when Empress Dowager Xiao of the Liao empire built garden palaces into this narrow gorge, and traces it forward through Ming dynasty poets who carved verses into the cliffs, believing they had found the south in the north. The guide then turns to 1973, when engineers dammed the gorge's mouth and let the valley drown to form the jade-green reservoir you see today, and to the dragon-shaped escalator built into the cliff face. Come in winter for the ice lantern festival that has run here since 1987.