Zhongshan Park (中山公园/中山公園) is a public park that lies just to the southwest of the Forbidden City. It is the favorite Beijing park of one of Grace’s friends and former co-workers and she highly recommended that we visit it. It is a former imperial garden since the Ming Dynasty and the site of the Altar of Earth and Harvests which was built in 1421.

The park contains a number of halls and pavilions that were built for the imperial family and a greenhouse which contains 39 varieties of tulips that were presented to the park by the Princess of Holland in 1977. The park was named Zhongshan Park in 1928 after Sun Yat-sen who is referred to as Sun Zhongshan. A statue of Sun Yat-sen stands at the Protection of Peace Gate (previously known as the Ketteler-Denkmal, a stone archway memorial for Baron von Ketteler, a German ambassador who was killed in 1900 during the Boxer Rebeliion in revenge for executing a Chinese boy.)

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