In summer 2001 we spent six weeks in China, traveling all over and visiting Rosie's relatives and classmates. I kept a rough diary of our progress, in four parts:
Heaven Pool is a volcanic lake at the top of a mountain named Chang Bai Shan ("Ever-white Mountain"), on the border between China and North Korea. My impressions of it are in Part Two of my China Diary. Or you could track down a copy of H.E.M. James's Victorian travel classic The Long White Mountain (1887), from which I have taken the following:
"The first day of our halt it rained, and we made the ascent the next. We climbed the slope behind the house, up to our waists in luxuriant wet grass, full of tiger-lilies and other gorgeous flowers, and across a stretch of moorland perhaps two or three miles broad, covered with a dwarf white rhododendron, a lovely little pink flower like an azalea, a pink heath, and other flowers. Then we commenced the slope leading up to the saddle. Even here, on the naked pumice, were clumps of wild yellow poppies, dwarf saxifrage, a vetch, and other botanical treasures. It was a steep climb, reminding one somewhat of Vesuvius, except that the rain had consolidated the loose pumice. At last we got to the top and looked over the edge, and lo! at the bottom of a crater on whose brink we were standing, about three hundred and fifty feet below us, we saw a beautiful lake, its color of the deepest, most pellucid blue, and, though the wind was howling above, its surface as still as Lake Leman, reflecting the crown of fantastic peaks with which the rugged top of the mountain was adorned. It was indeed a superb spectacle. We judged the lake to be about a mile and a half broad, and six or seven miles in circumference."
Heaven Pool is right on the border between China and North Korea. Here is a border sign, very weather-beaten. It says, in Korean and Chinese, something like: "Welcome to North Korea. Now go home!" The people in the background are tourists from the China side -- mainly South Koreans -- who just want to say they've been into North Korea. There were no border guards -- it's the top of a mountain, for goodness' sake.
We paid our respects to Taiye (pronounced "tie-yeah"). Taiye means "ultimate grandpa". He is actually Rosie's paternal grandfather, born December 28th 1905, and therefore 95½ years old in this picture (but 97 by traditional Chinese reckoning, which considers you to be one year old at birth, and a year older at every Lunar New Year).