A "Cave" at the Eastern Imperial Garden 东御花园 at the Puppet Emperor's Palace 伪满洲皇宫
I finally got tired going around the Puppet Emperor’s Palace. It was like a tour of someone’s mansion, most of the decors, though impressive, are starting to look alike. Fortunately, there wasn’t much interesting stuff left to see in the palace and I eventually found myself outside the palace. Much like how the Forbidden City has gardens, the Puppet Emperor’s Palace also has imperial gardens here. The Eastern Imperial Garden is one of the larger of the gardens found inside the palace grounds and it is most likely that Puyi spent much of his time here, after all, he was confined to the palace most of the time.
The Eastern Imperial Garden 东御花园 at the Puppet Emperor's Palace 伪满洲皇宫
The Eastern Imperial Garden though not that large, didn’t have a lot of interesting stuff there, it was a garden after all. One round around the garden revealed small “mountain”. It is not strange for Chinese gardens to contain miniature mountains but this one seemed to be special. There mountain had a “cave”, big enough for a person to go through. Apparently, this “cave” also functioned as a bomb shelter for the emperor, those were the times when air raids were common and it was a necessity to have during those days. For the emperor, it was prudent to build the bomb shelter outside the palace buildings, though they still have to make a run for it to get to the shelter itself.
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