Forbidden City

Ok, after Tiananmen square on the first day we went to the Forbidden City, pretty amazing and we must have taken about 80 photos whie we were there. Here is only and select few, the rest can wait for our slide show when we get home. I haven't got the book in front of me so please excuse any factual mistakes in this commentary of the The Forbidden City. In the days of the Emperor Beijing / Peking was divided into various levels of security, this was to limit who got to see the Emperor. There was the outer city the inner city and the forbidden city, people had to pass seven gates if they wanted to meet with the Emperor. Below is about the third gate, it has a name but I can't remember what is it was. The book that has the answer is packed in the new case we had to buy for all our chinese investments, I will not be unpacking this until we get home as it took some considerable effort to get it closed. In the foreground you can see the soldiers practicing for the dawn and dusk parades.

This bridge is one of five crossing a moat on the way to see the Emperor, this bridge, the middle one was only used by the Emperor and his wife. His wife only got to use it once, as she was not coming back out once she was in the Forbidden City.

The animal figurines on the tops of the buildings signify the importance of the building, the building with the highest importance has 11. Not sure why I didn't get a photo of the building with 11 figurines, it's probably in the stash of photos somewhere.

The court yards inside the Forbidden City were stone, but the difference between this and what you have at home is that these court yards have 15 separate layers of stone layer stacked perpendicular to each other. The court yard was apparently constructed like this to stop people digging into the Forbidden City to try and kill the Emporer.

I put this photo in because I thing it looks cool and sums up a lot of what we saw in the Forbidden City, heaps of impressive buildings, heaps of marble (marble is cheaper than wood to use in China), not too many people and great weather.

This is photo of a pot that used to be coated in gold until the British came and scraped it all off and took it away. These pots were used because the the buildings were made of ood, what? odd,....what? odd, arghhh yes wood. Because the building were made of wood they had tendency to catch on fire every now and then, these pots were filled with water and the water was used to put out the fires.

The stone carving below is carved out of one piece of marble and weighs approximately 250 tons. The stone was bought from the mountains that are about 100 miles away, it took some years in the olden days (can you tell I don't really know dates / times?) for the stone to be moved to the Forbidden City. In the winter time chanels were dug and filled with water, the water was frozen and the stones was moved by sliding it across the ice, in summer logs of ood were used to roll it.

This is a photo of where one of the young Emporers used to sit while discussing affairs with his council. The yellow curtain behind his seat was pulled down and his mother, the dargon lady, would sit behind it and tell the Emporer what to say.

Below is Oliver about to giv e Hamish a back hander because he is not listening, not really, Oliver was great.

The Forbidden City, what an awe inspiring place, definitly one of the first stops on any visit to Beijing.

Just aside, the weather while we were in Beijing was amazing 28-30C, no wind, nice heat not like home. The pollution is an issue and you'll see in some of the photos, the haze, but whether it was that my lungs were used to hanging out with smokers or what, the pollution didn't seem to affect us adversely and we did spend alot of time out and about in the city.