After a delicious meal of fish, tofu, greens, chicken, pork and rice (not all together but in different dishes, Chinese style plucking away at them one by one with chop sticks,) in a private dining room at the Beijing Mountain Village International House of Respect for the Aged, my friends and I retired to rest under the tea house pavilion deck overlooking the pond.

If you go to the Mountain Village website , you will see -- from a higher vantage point -- the view I was looking at from the teahouse. The white marble deck is used for performance, while people can sit on the other side of the pond by the teahouse to watch the show. The white crooked bridge on the right is also marble, Suzhou style, and leads to some single-room apartments in a community dedicated, according to its brochure, to a residence for the elderly that is “high level, high quality, high affinity, high personality and high humanity.”

An American working in Beijing as an editor for china.org.cn, I was invited to come along on a visit to Mountain Village by three Chinese friends in their sixties who were looking at Mountain Village as part of their consideration of their housing options after retirement. According to them, Mountain Village opened about two years ago as a private non-profit business registered under the auspices of the Beijing welfare department by a wealthy Chinese contractor who wanted to give something back to society.

As I lounged on the tea house pavilion watching the carp and ducks, I thought about all my visits to Kendal at Oberlin, Ohio, also a not-for-profit retirement community with goals similar to those stated by Mountain Village where my 89-year-old mother lives in the United States. One of the things about Mountain Village that immediately reminded me of Kendal was the range of ages -- a lot of little children were running around, and young people on staff, and older people. The energy and feel of the two places is similar, and good.

When we arrived at Mountain Village, we were greeted by a Piao Yinhua, manager of the public relations department, who took us on a tour. Behind the building with the white marble deck (the building is a conference room) to the left is the medical wing where we met the woman Chinese traditional medicine doctor and some of her adoring patients. One patient told us she came in using a walker but now can dance. And she demonstrated! On the wall hangs a calligraphy signed to Dr. Ren Laiying from her patients thanking her for keeping illness away. We were told the community has three doctors and three nurses on staff 24 hours a day. All apartments are equipped with call buttons to summon help if needed. Mountain Village has contractual relationships with hospitals in the area should someone need it.

Next to the doctor's office was a pharmacy with both western and traditional Chinese medicine and then a room for measuring cardio-vascular. Tucked in there were various exercise machines. One room has three recliners with electronic massage and several massage machines, too, for the feet.

We also visited the art room where people can do calligraphy or whatever. A woman resident was there as a volunteer attendant in a system which, as I understood it, is similar to the volunteer service system established at Kendal.

Mountain Village currently has 600 members with 100 of them living on premise, ranging in age from about 50 to 93. The 93-year-old, I was told, is a piano player. You need to have a physical as part of the entry requirements, and those who are not of sound mind or who have communicable diseases are not admitted.

For a two room apartment with two baths and a living room, air-conditioning, TV and beds the cost is US$50,000 for Chinese and US$60,000 for foreigners. After this one-time entry fee, you pay 10 yuan (about US$1.20) a day for meals in the restaurant, which we visited and which is quite nice. The weekly menu is posted and the meals vary every day. Private dining rooms also are available for guests and visitors.

An attractive feature of membership is that this contractor has built similar versions of Mountain Village in Hainan, Beidaihe, the Yellow River and Guilin -- all major resort areas of China. Members from one community are invited to visit another free during arranged group visits.

There is also a small hotel on site where guests of a member can stay for US$10 a night. The hotel is situated on a small lake, lined by willow trees and stocked with fish for fishing. On the backside of the lake are several traditional Chinese courtyard complexes with all the modern amenities which go for US$150,000, for Chinese or foreigners. One of those has already been bought by a German. Mountain Village is also completing construction in this area of a residential campus -- also in the traditional courtyard design -- where residents can teach in fields of their expertise or take classes in areas of their interests.

One of my friends knew a couple living in the apartment complex which also houses the hotel, the only two-story housing on site. All the other apartments are one-story. Her friend and his wife have only lived there a few weeks and like it enormously. He is a retired public relations officer for the Chinese embassy in Washington D.C., typical of the kind of resident this place is attracting.

"I got tired of cooking three meals a day. Now I have time to concentrate on my writing," he said.

After lunch and our rest at the tea house -- which just as well could be in the Forbidden City with its traditional mahogany tables, chairs and architecture -- we toured an adjoining building in modern style that included conference rooms, indoor swimming pool, sauna, bowling alley, pool hall, bar and disco and table tennis and exercise rooms with state-of-the-art equipment everywhere. The indoor pool looked particularly inviting on a hot day.

We ended our trip with a 20-minute bus ride in the Mountain Village bus that makes four trips daily to and from Beijing. I don’t know what the choice of my friends will be, but it would appear that if they choose to move to Mountain Village they will find themselves in a place – like Kendal at Oberlin – where friends and family will be looking forward to visiting them, often.

For more information about Beijing Mountain (Taishenxianghe) Village contact Ms. Piao Yinhua, manager, public relations department; P.O. Box 6309 Beijing 102206; tel: 80713465/69-8168/8122; fax: 80713811; e-mail: tsxh@public3.bta.net.cn

(china.org.cn 08/06/2001)