Beijing Notes 018: Yalugu Tropical Botanical Garden

后山

July 05

Yesterday marked the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. A few days ago, an American friend wished me a happy holiday. Taken aback, I asked what holiday it was. She smiled and replied, "The Fourth of July, of course."

Living in Beijing, I had completely forgotten about this American national holiday, a day I used to have off every single year.

On the morning of July 5th in Beijing, it was still the night of July 4th across the ocean. My WeChat Moments feed was flooded with snapshots of Americans celebrating Independence Day. Yet, aside from that digital bustle, it felt utterly detached from my reality.

Alone in Beijing on a long, slow Sunday, I wondered how to spend my day. I turned to Doubao, the AI assistant, which suggested a newly built tropical botanical garden not far away. This piqued my interest, so I hopped into my car and drove over. An amusing episode happened en route: a driver suddenly honked at me. Looking closely, I saw him waving through his window with a warm smile. I racked my brain but couldn't place him—as it turned out, he simply recognized my license plate. We both rolled down our windows, and amidst the intermittent honks and traffic noise, I yelled out that I was heading south to the tropical botanical garden.

As I walked alone through this man-made tropical rainforest park, my mind kept drifting back and forth between the two worlds of China and America, still tangled in the various snippets of Independence Day news. Shortly after entering the park, I spotted a cluster of honeysuckle climbing up a fence. This vine is a rare sight in China, and its presence instantly transported me back to the United States, where wild honeysuckle grows in overwhelming abundance. With their relentless vitality, they spread everywhere, propelled by birds that feed on their seeds. The backyard of a house I once lived in was completely overrun by them, enveloping the property in a dense, intoxicating fragrance when in bloom. In China, however, honeysuckle is primarily cultivated as a classic traditional medicine and is seldom found in the wild. That a plant so ordinary could tangle me in such a web of temporal and spatial displacement was striking.

Beijing's current mid-summer temperatures offer a fair approximation of the tropics, though the humidity falls short of Yunnan's pristine rainforests. Built in the far suburbs, this artificial greenhouse was likely conceived with a simple, practical purpose: to provide a weekend retreat for city dwellers who cannot make the trip to Yunnan. Yet, walking through it, the heavy hand of artificial contrivance was visible at every turn, stirring up layers of memory and reflection.

The entire park is built inside massive greenhouses. In the winter, the tropical flora relies on plastic sheeting to survive the cold; in the height of summer, the sheets are removed to let the trees grow naturally. Thanks to the recent heavy rains in Beijing, the vegetation was thriving reasonably well. Gazing from an elevated vantage point, I saw groves of palm trees partitioned by glass curtain walls—without this climate-controlled environment, they would never survive a harsh Beijing winter. The park also featured two ponds of murky, stagnant water. To my astonishment, a few men were angling serenely along the turbid banks. It was an surreal sight.

Along the path, I came across several banana trees heavily laden with plump fruit, each bearing an "adoption tag" that allowed tourists to claim the harvest for a fee. Nearby, a grove of hardy plantains grew lush and upright. This immediately reminded me of the potted plantain I have kept at home for over twenty years—my wife has been back in the U.S. for two weeks now, and I wondered if the plant had regained its vigor. The park was also interspersed with dense patches of cacti, though they lacked the wild grandeur and towering presence of those in the Arizona desert; only a few stood tall enough to offer a faint whisper of exoticism. Occasionally, indigenous northern species were mixed into the landscape. One chinaberry tree, laden with green fruit, struck a deeply poignant chord in me. It is a tree ubiquitous in my southern hometown, and it instantly brought back childhood memories of harvesting chinaberries to sell to brick kilns, triggering a sudden wave of nostalgia. On a more absurd note, the park featured a so-called "Peacock Pavilion," which did nothing but blast a looped recording of peacock cries over a loudspeaker; from start to finish, not a single peacock feather was in sight.

Having never been to Yunnan, I cannot say how wide the chasm is between a genuine, primordial rainforest and this man-made facsimile. However, I have been to the pristine rainforests of Costa Rica in Central America, where the vegetation is truly four-dimensional—the trunks of towering trees are wrapped in thick layers of parasitic mosses and epiphytic orchids, creating a complex tapestry of life. In stark contrast, this artificial garden resorted to hanging plastic imitations from the branches—a painstaking yet hollow effort. The crude, artificial ornaments interspersed among the natural greenery created a disjointed aesthetic that clashed violently with my preference for the wild and authentic.

The stifling indoor exhibition area claimed a constant temperature of 26°C, but the perceived heat felt much higher. A rudimentary cooling rest area was packed with tourists seeking refuge from the heat. By chance, I caught sight of a young woman wearing a Northwestern University T-shirt. Filled with the sudden joy of finding a kindred spirit in an unexpected place, I approached her to strike up a conversation. To my disappointment, she replied blankly that she had bought the shirt online, could not read the English letters, and knew nothing of the prestigious university it represented. A profound sense of deflation washed over me.

Leaving the rest area, I followed the walkway to a performance stage. In the muggy space, benches were arranged neatly as background music looped monotonously. After a ten-minute wait, the show began. Three ethnic dances were performed in succession: a Miao dance that was standard and unexceptional; a Hani dance set to the familiar lyrics and melody of *The Awa People Walk with the Party*, which instantly reawakened distant childhood memories from fifty or sixty years ago; and finally, a Dong dance to close the segment. Yet, what should have been a cultural showcase abruptly veered into a sideshow of performing dogs, pigs, and cats. The bizarre juxtaposition of distinctive ethnic dances and street-style pet tricks left me utterly bewildered by the organizers' intentions.

As I walked out of the park, I couldn’t help but reflect on the natural and cultural spaces I have encountered over the years. More than two decades ago, I visited the ancient city of Siena, Italy, where centuries-old local customs, historic pageants, and indigenous cuisine are preserved in their authentic, living forms. Even the water towns of Jiangnan, like Zhouhuang and Nanxun, possess an unbroken lineage of cultural heritage. This park, by comparison, felt like a hurried commercial project spawned by the modern trend of short-distance tourism—a slapdash stitching together of Yunnan flora and minority cultural symbols. The logistics of transporting southern flora, the daily climate control, and the maintenance of such vast greenhouses must incur exorbitant expenses. If they expect to recoup costs and turn a profit solely through ticket sales, it will undoubtedly be a long and arduous road ahead.

For the casual tourist, this place is enough to pass a weekend day. But for someone like me, who moves between two lives in China and America and has long been steeped in two vastly different perspectives on nature and culture, this patched-together artificial rainforest brought something else entirely: a lingering sense of displacement and melancholy, born from the quiet collision of two worlds.