Prince Gong's Mansion

After visiting Shichahai Lake and a eating quick lunch at a delicious little hole-in-the-wall noodle place, we walked to Prince Gong's Mansion. It is a well-preserved Chinese mansion which was built in 1777 and given to Prince Gong as a gift from his brother, the Qing Emperor Xianfeng, in 1851. I have to say, I have been to quite a few mansions and palaces in Beijing, and after a while (like the first few feet) they all kind of look the same. There's a courtyard in front of an ornately painted but mostly lacquer-red building, and when you walk through that building you enter another courtyard that looks just like the one before it! Prince Gong's Mansion is a little bit more original than others in that there is a lovely little pond at the back of it, and Seth had a lot of fun trying to get the ducks' attention by plucking flower petals and throwing them in. (He wasn't successful, by the way.)