Forbidden City - Beijing (10th June'04)

View of Beijing from inside Forbidden City

Beijing City is undoubtedly very impressive - tall skyscrapers, wide roads and multi level long flyovers everywhere. A lot of construction is also going on for the 2008 Olympics.

Tiananmen Square

People's Hall

The famous Tiananmen Square is huge. Our guide said it's the world's largest square - reportedly 1 million people can occupy the square at one time. It's not exactly square, more like a rectangle. It's surrounded on the four sides by the people's hall (the Chinese parliament house, which has a banquet hall which can reportedly seat 10,000 people), Mao's memorial, history museum and the Forbidden City.

Entrance to the Forbidden City

The Forbidden City is the old emperor's palace, which was occupied by the emperors till the early part of 20th century. The guide repeatedly referred to the movie "The Last Emperor" and even pointed out some differencess from the movie version. The last emperor was crowned at the age of three. He was chosen from among the royal family, as the previous emperor had died without leaving an heir. He was expelled from the Forbidden City in the 1920 when he (or his men) tried to take the royal treasures out and sell them - these treasures are reportedly now in Taiwan, where Chiang Kai Shek fled with them after being defeated by Mao. Then the emperor was imprisoned for a long time, first in USSR and then in free China, before being released finally in the 1950s; he has later written his autobiography.

Entering the Forbidden City

Reportedly, no one in the empire was allowed to build any house taller than the Forbidden City, nor use golden coloured roof like the City nor even use the dragon motif. The City is surrounded by a moat. The bridge over the moat has five marble bridges reaching the outer gate - the middle one for the emperor to cross, left one for the royal family, the right one for the courtiers and the others for the commoners. Inside the outer gate, there are offices of translators on the left and of secretaries on the right. All the courtiers (who used to come outside the outer gate at 4 am come rain or shine) sat kneeling down in the huge courtyard inside the outer gate when the emperor ruled.

There are three gates to the inner City (which served as the emperor's personal palaces) - only the emperor (and the empress only once after the wedding) could use the central one. The palaces in the City are all made of carved wood, though the floor is made of marble & inner room floors of golden coloured bricks. The palace has a Golden Throne building where the emperor sat. The gate to the emperor's complex of buildings was called the Meridien Gate, as the emperor believed the meridien line (international time line) passed thru that place (remember am/pm - anti meridien/post meridien). Come to think of it, he may actually have been right - if the western countries had not imposed the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), adopting the line in Greenwich in England as the central time line, China's may have been the time line; after all, scientifically I don't think there is any one central longitude in the earth and the time lines are all assumptions.