A day in the frantic, bustling (and smoggy) capital of China – Beijing – today. With a pollution warning of ‘high’ today, we took the complimentary face masks out with us for the day. How many other hotels in the world provide complimentary face masks, I wonder! The day was overcast with the sun not able to break through the smog, but Beijing was nevertheless colourful … Colourful in the sense of being crowded and overwhelming!
We started the day with a short bus ride down to Tiananmen Square. We had to jump off the bus rapidly as they are not allowed to stop there (but they all do) and then merged anonymously into the masses – something which was exaggerated as Tiananmen Square was effectively shut. The guide was proudly telling us that the square could take a million people as it was so large, but today it took just a few hundred and they were all police and army. It turns out that all the important people (politicans) are I town for the Annual Peoples Congress and so security is heightened everywhere. We had to go through airport style security just to walk along the road browse the square. However, we did see the Great Hall of the People, the Monument to the People’s Heroes and Mao’s Mausoleum – the main buildings on the square.
From there we walked through the modestly named Gate of Heavenly Peace with a portrait of Mao hanging over it (apparently they change it every year) and into the Forbidden City. Turns out that it is only forbidden now if you are the eighty thousand and first person each day as they only allow 80,000 people a day to visit. We felt like we were just on a conveyor belt of people being ingested at one end and exhaled at the other about an hour and a half later!
The Forbidden City was the Emperor’s Palace from 1420 until 1912 – the end of the Qing Dynasty and the last emperor. It turns out that the emperors liked a lot of space with an inner and outer are to the palace and enormous numbers of rooms. Allegedly there are 9,999 rooms (as apparently there are 10,000 in heaven), but the way they count rooms is slightly debateable, so there are probably more like 8,000 – still a fair number to clean! It seems he needed quite a few, just to keep his concubines – around 1,000 of them.
In the afternoon, we went to the Temple of Heaven – another of those understated names. This one was used just twice a year for ceremonies to bless the harvest.