China Guide
Hebei
Beidaihe
On the Bohai Gulf, 300km east of Beijing, lies the rather bizarre seaside resort of Beidaihe. The coastline, reminiscent of the Mediterranean – rocky, sparsely vegetated, erratically punctuated by beaches – was originally patronized a hundred years ago by European diplomats and businessmen, who can only have chosen it out of homesickness. After the Communist takeover, the village became a pleasure resort for Party bigwigs, reaching its height of popularity in the 1970s when seaside trips were no longer seen as decadent. Though you'll still see serious men in uniforms and sunglasses licking lollipops, most of Beidaihe's visitors nowadays are ordinary tourists, usually well-heeled Beijingers.
In high season, when the temperature is steady around the mid-20s Celsius, it's a fun place to spend the day. The streets along the seafront are at their liveliest – most buildings are either restaurants, with crabs and prawns bobbing about in buckets outside, or shops selling Day-Glo swimsuits, inflatables, snorkelling gear, souvenirs and even sculptures of chickens made of shells and raffia. On Beidaihe's three beaches, stirring revolutionary statues of lantern-jawed workers and their wives and children stand among the throngs of bathers. Away from the sea, up the hill, the tree-lined streets are much quieter, and many of the buildings are guesthouses, though this is also where you find the villas of the Party elite, guarded by discreet soldiers. It's rumoured that every Politburo member once had a residence here, and many probably still do. All around are huge, chunky buildings, often with absurd decorative touches – Roman columns, fake totem poles, Greek porticoes – grafted onto their ponderous facades. These are work-unit hotels and sanatoriums for heroes of the people – factory workers, soldiers and the like – when they are granted the privilege of a seaside holiday.