Beidaihe

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Central Beidaihe and its beaches

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Within a few weeks of arriving in Qinhuangdao, a couple of students were kind enough to take me for a day trip to Beidaihe District. At that time, this meant changing buses at Yanshan University (known locally as “Yanda”, short for “Yanshan Daxue”), which I didn’t visit until much later. There have been a lot of changes since that visit: the whole town has been ‘upgraded’ – although most of the buildings are the same, they have been cleaned up, the street stalls have largely disappeared, there is new street furniture instead, and the beach has been divided up into different areas, the most popular of which are now fenced off and only accessible by buying a ticket. They were free back then, in a cold and windy March 2007. The pictures above are from that visit.

In July 2007, as part of a project with my Tourism students, I was back again, and visited more of the local attractions. From then on, I went through to Beidaihe quite a lot on my own, with students, or with visitors.

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Liangfengshan Park

My first visit here was with my Tourism students on a project to improve the English-language signs. As you will see, some improvement was required (not sure about the Russian).

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Jifa ‘Ecological Gardens’

Jifa is another tourist site that was very much “in development” while I was in QHD. Much of it was still being built in 2007 and 2008 – I don’t think I went back any later than that, so it’s probably much more elaborate now. It’s a combination of botanical garden, educational exhibition, and amusement park.