Many tourists coming to Beijing will choose to visit the Tiananmen Square the and Forbidden City. But there is a beautiful park "hidden" beside: Zhongshan Park. The location of Zhongshan Park is nice, west of the Tiananmen Square and a wall away from the Forbidden City.

The first thing that caught people's eye after entering the park is the promenade on both sides, much like the world-renowned corridor in the Summer Palace, this promenade is also covered with colorful and attractive paintings. It is said that there are more than a thousand paintings, all hand-painted by using traditional pigments. The paintings include the stories of the Four Masterpieces, as well as the classical contents of the history, combined with flowers, birds, fish and insects, which are gorgeous. If you enter from the south and walk all the way to the east, you can finish reading the stories of the Four Masterpieces.

On the central axis of the garden is the Peace Defense Memorial Gate. It is a four-pillar, three-story, blue-glazed tile-roofed memorial gate with an inscription by Guo Moruo. Through the gate is the bronze statue of Sun Yat-sen. The bronze statue is 3.4 meters high and weighs 1.8 tons. The base is about 1.6 meters high, with black marble veneer. The front side is engraved with the gilt inscription reading "Eternal glory to the great revolutionary forerunner Mr. Sun Yat-sen" written by Comrade Deng Xiaoping. The memorial bronze statue was proposed by 54 members of the Beijing Municipal Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in March 1983 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Sun Yat-sen's death.

There are 602 cypress trees in Zhongshan Park, in addition to four ancient acacias and six spruce trees. Most of the ancient cypresses in the park were planted in the early Ming dynasty during the construction of the Altar of Land and Grain. They were planted around the altar wall with uniform spacing and arranged horizontally and vertically. The Liao cypress in the South Altar Gate, which has lasted for thousands of years, is a relic of the Xingguo Temple in the Liao Dynasty and is the oldest recorded cypress tree in Beijing. The ancient trees of different forms are majestic.

There are also many ancient buildings in the garden. Outside the Altar of Land and Grain to the southwest, there are ancillary buildings such as the Kitchen, the Treasury and the Slaughterhouse. The Evergreen Garden is located to the east of the Altar, where rockeries, trellises, flower beds are set. Among them, there are Songbai Jiaocui pavilion, Touhu pavilion, Laijin Yuxuan and other attractions.

The garden is small and quiet, and the scenery is impressive. You may enjoy it all day long.

Translator: ZHAO Huinan

Reviewer: ZHANG Ruochen