9th May – Beijing Forbidden City & Summer Palace

Today we have a tour of Tiananmen Square, The Forbidden City & The Summer Palace.  Our first stop is Tiananmen Square where we start walking from the South Gate, past Chairman Mao’s tomb, past The Great Hall of the People (Chinese parliament building) on the west and the National Museum on the East arriving at The Forbidden City at the north of the square.  There are beautiful gardens on the side, but the middle is a large open area that today is full of tourists.

  

The Forbidden City has about 80,000 visitors each day so we join the queue and enter.  The Forbidden City was started to be built by Emperor Zhu Di whose tomb we saw yesterday at the Ming Tombs.  The Forbidden City is surrounded by a moat and inside it has many gates, courtyards, buildings & statues that we see as we continue to walk through the city northward.

The people are about 6 deep at the doorways that allow us a glimpse of the inside of the buildings, but it’s worth it when we finally get there after being pushed in the back by people trying to get past us.

Only the Emperor is allowed to use 9 dragons, and these can be seen on the corners of the roof of the Emperor’s residence (sitting between a mythical character & man at the back and a rooster at the front) and on a large mural depicting 9 dragons.

After leaving the Forbidden City we have a delicious dumpling lunch and the bus then takes us to The Summer Palace which takes about half an hour.

The Summer Palace was used as a summer residence by The Dragon Lady, Empress Dowager Cixi. These lovely Palace grounds only has about 45,000 visitors each day, with the majority of them locals. Kay met up with a lovely Mother & daughter who wanted to have a photo with her.(must be the blonde hair)

In the middle of the site is a large lake, that we walk around, on the longest corridor in the world. There is a cover over this corridor that has 6,000 beautiful painting on it.

We walk past a temple that the Empress used and we went all the way around to the Marble Boat, which doesn’t float, but gives the feeling that you’re on the water.

Unfortunately, it’s too windy to catch a dragon boat so we have to walk back, passing another temple that has a lovely statue of a mythical character out the front.

Before we leave we can’t resist a photo of the Silk Road dragons with the Dragon Lady!

Henk has a follow up appointment this afternoon with the doctor who does another ultra sound and blasts more stones to break them up, which knocks him around and leaves him in quite a bit of pain.