Day Two - Tienanmen Square and the Forbidden City

Our tour properly started on day two with a morning visit to Tienanmen Square.The National Day holiday was still in full swing - 'day' is a misnomer they have a full week so the square was dressed for the holiday with flower displays in the style of the cities ancient walls and a huge vase of flowers. 

The vase of flowers was pretty much in the centre of the square

As you can see from the picture, which shows less than half of it, Tienanmen Square is (like everything we'd come across so far) really massive, but the crowd's for Mao's mausoleum were still spectacular.

This shot of the queue was taken at the far end from Mao's tomb by the city's ancient gates

These people were spending three hours in line making their way across the square in order to spend just three minutes filing past his tomb. We were later to realise that this was spectacular not just for the size of the crowds but also for the fact that they were actually queueing. Queueing is not the Chinese way of doing things. We just paid our respects the easy way, from outside. 

Just off to the left is where the student challenged the tank.

Beyond Tienanmen Square you enter the Forbidden City which must have been truly awe inspiring when the rest of Beijing was simple, small and low-rise. Now, although still very impressive, it's in some ways dwarfed by the skyscraper city around it.  And it's almost totally empty - it's treasures reside in the Louvre, the British museum and a lot in Taiwan taken by the Chinese nationalist government when it retreated there in 1949.

It's a city because it once held 86,000 people all at the service of one man, the emperor. And his wives,concubines, eunuchs and maids, and accommodation for all the visiting dignitaries presumably with their entourages etc.

Inside the second set of gates

Inside the first set of gates

 It's built in a series of concentric rings of walls and gates and storehouse/treasure houses until you come to the inner places of the emperor.



Whatever your opinion of the following regimes you can see why they might have wanted to rid themselves of the burden of having an emperor.

View back from the Hall

The hall of Supreme Harmony

The scale of the place is colossal and it just goes on and on with residential areas for the different wives and concubines and an internal garden. The whole palace complex is surrounded by a moat. See here for a map 

Looking across the moat towards the Forbidden City

After all that walking it was time for lunch which included the first weird dish of the day. This was an oddly gelatinous soup containing a little cabbage and nothing else much. It was as though you'd cooked rice, and kept only the water and cooked cabbage in it, and kept mainly the water and then boiled a cracked egg in the water - and then just served the water.