Beidaihe: A Summer Resort Built on Sand and Migration

The beach at Beidaihe is a hundred metres of fine yellow sand down to the water, and the water is shallow a long way out. The resort strip runs ten kilometres from east to west, from the Yinjiao Pavilion to the mouth of the Daihe River. Behind it, Mount Lianfeng lifts two peaks covered in pines and cypresses; between the mountain and the sand lie the caves, decorated pavilions, secluded paths and winding bridges that draw visitors from across the country.

The district is small: 70.14 square kilometres, a coastline of 22.5 kilometres, and a population of 130,104 at the 2020 census. Its climate is warm temperate and semi-humid, a monsoon climate moderated by the sea. The district has two subdistricts, Xishan and Dongshan, and three towns, Haibin, Daihe and Niutouya. Forest covers more than seventy per cent of it. The average temperature in the summer months is 24.5 degrees Celsius, and the sea is the reason a capital city can be cool.

At the eastern end the Yinjiao Pavilion marks the start of the strip; at the western end the Daihe River enters the bay. Between the two the same hundred metres of sand repeats for ten kilometres, and the Bohai stays shallow far out. The pines begin almost at the beach, and the same two peaks stay in view along the whole strip. The scale is human throughout: sand, shallow water and the line of pines behind.

In the Guangxu reign of the Qing, foreigners living in Beijing asked for permission to build villas on this coast. In 1898 the Qing government formally designated Beidaihe a summer resort for people of all nations, a designation that opened the coast to villas from many nations. By 1938 more than seven hundred villas stood here; by 1949 there were 719.

After 1949 the villas were joined by institutions. Sanatoria were built to reward model workers, and in 1954 a large Friendship Guesthouse was constructed to receive Soviet advisers, one of dozens built across the country for that purpose. The district became a summer retreat for the leadership, and the meetings held here each July gave the place a political weight out of proportion to its size. In 1954, staying at Beidaihe, Mao Zedong wrote a poem named after it, which begins with a rainstorm sweeping down on the northern land and white breakers leaping at the sky.

The July meetings were suspended in 2003, by order of Hu Jintao, and resumed in 2007, ahead of the 17th Party Congress that autumn.

One event is inseparable from the name. On 13 September 1971 Lin Biao, accused of plotting a coup, fled to his villa here with his wife and a son, boarded a plane at the local airport bound for the Soviet Union, and died when it crashed in Mongolia.

The birds arrive on a different calendar. Beidaihe lies on one of East Asia's most important migration corridors, and every year large numbers of waders and other birds pass through. Birdwatchers call the wetland here a birding mecca, and the municipal bird-banding station is one of the stations in China that has ringed the most birds. The district has a municipal migratory bird reserve, a national wetland park, and a coastline that puts wetland, open water and shoreline within a few kilometres of the beach.

Ringing is how that passage is made legible. A bird caught at the station is fitted with a numbered ring, measured and released, and the number can later be read at another station on the route. A single recovery turns a flock into a line between two coasts.

Bird and beach use different ground. The summer trade occupies the sand and the villas; the migration occupies the river mouth, the marsh and the shallow bays. A coast built for villas also kept wet ground, and wet ground is what the birds use.

There is a third layer, older than either. The Qin emperor's eastern tour left a palace site at Jinzui on this coast, and the district's place names, the Daihe River, the town of Niutouya, the subdistricts of Xishan and Dongshan, mark a shoreline that was named long before it became a resort.

What the visitor sees now is a managed coincidence: a hundred metres of sand, a shallow sea, a line of pines, and behind them a marsh that fills with wings on passage.