| My new life, so far... |
FROM BEIJING, CHINA
Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City
BEIJING, Oct 15, 2006 - My Chinese host Vincent had graciously offered to take me on a tour of the city today (Sunday) in his chauffeured car. We set off from my hotel around 9:30AM, and returned a little before 5PM. The over seven hours we spent today gallivanting around the Chinese capital felt like drinking out of a cultural fire hose. So until I sort out all the impressions, names, dynasties, centuries and temples, this travelogue will be shorter on narration and longer on visual images. Sometimes you paint pictures with words; other times you write stories with pictures. This is the latter kind of an essay...
Sunday was another "clear" (read gray and foggy/smoggy) day in Beijing. But these beautiful flowers just outside the entrance to the Forbidden City brightened up the morning.
Tiananmen Square
Before we bit into the forbidden fruit and entered the ancient imperial grounds, a dare that would have been punishable by beheading in ancient time, Vincent and I first walked under a wide avenue that separates Forbidden City and the Tiananmen Square. The enormous plateau on which history was made on June 4, 1989, the day the communist government crushed the pro-democracy movement here, is the biggest city square I have ever seen. There is no memorial to that day of infamy, of course.
Instead, the Chinese government has erected several large models that promote the 2008 Olympics. To my great surprise, there was also this big replica (above) of the Lamaist temple at Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. Behind the Lhasa model (above) you can also see The Great Hall of the People, a sort of a Chinese national assembly, where the Party-picked "people's delegates" gather to rubberstamp the communist leaders' decisions.
Here's a panoramic view of Lhasa, Tibet, elevation over 11,000 feet, with the above temple as it highest point (click here for the photo's source).
Back to Beijing, here are now the views from the center of Tiananmen Square in all four directions...
...the east, The Great Hall of the People...
...the west, a government building, where the clock is counting down to the opening day of the Olympics 2008...
...the south, with a monument to communist revolutionary heroes...
... and to the north, where you're seeing in the distance above the entrance gate to the Forbidden City in front of which you saw the flowers in the first photo. And just think, this is only half the giant square whose name stands for Gates to Heaven and Peace.
As we approached that gate, we came across this military guards that stood as erect and as still as statues.
And finally, my friend Vincent took this picture right in front of the entrance gate to the Forbidden City. I've found it more than a little ironic that they still have Mao's picture and the communist crest on the structures that were built circa 1420 by the emperors of the Ming Dynasty.
Forbidden City
As we proceeded to walk through a gate after gate, with no end seemingly in sight, I began to appreciate the enormity of the Forbidden City. So maybe that's why you should first take a look at the map of it...
We entered the Forbidden City through the south gate (the bottom of the map), and exited it more than two hours later through the Imperial Gardens at the top (north) end of the map. To put things in perspective, the above rectangle is more than 10 football fields long, and over seven football fields wide - 178 acres in total. So join us for a walk, but make sure you are wearing comfy shoes... :-)
A detail at the roof of the preceding building, showing how intricate the design patterns are. The patterns and the colors are amazingly consistent throughout the Forbidden City...
...as you can also see from this detailed view.
Continuing our walk northward...
...this is the biggest internal square.
This is the interior of the above palace, room in which the emperor rested before making his public appearances and pronouncements. There was also another palace in which he dressed for them, another one in which he meditated, another one for... (get the picture?) ...10,000 rooms in total in the Forbidden City.
The above painting depicts the wedding of a Qing (Manchurian) Dynasty emperor in 1780 on these very grounds. It shows how the vast space was used for ceremonial purposes, something that is difficult to image today with thousands of tourists milling around.
This huge stone carving speaks for itself. You can read about its enormity and history in English from the plaque on the right.
Imperial Gardens
The palaces and the gates of the Forbidden City attest as to the grandeur and power of the Chinese emperors. But the Imperial Gardens that line the north end of the Forbidden City are their delicate jewel. This is the part of our walk I enjoyed the most, not because the garden contained some forbidden fruit or secret of the Forbidden City, but because it is so beautiful. Take a look...
These four Chinese girls were posing as Indian goddesses in the Imperial Gardens for their friend (back of his head is showing). I snapped this picture just before their pose collapsed, while their photographer was still fiddling with his camera settings. Speed and simplicity over perfection and complexity. :-)
By the way, in case you're wondering why you're not seeing any grass anywhere within the imperial grounds, not even in its gardens, that's because the Chinese emperors believed that trees signified nobility and grass the commoners. So they purposely dried out the ground so no grass would grow. Which puts a new spin to the old saying, "grass does not grow under his feet." :-)
And then it was time for lunch...
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