Day 2 in China: Beijing
On this day you will first visit Tiananmen Square followed by the magnificent Forbidden City.In the afternoon you will marvel at the incredible Temple of Heaven.
The day started late since none of us managed to get to sleep until about 1:00am. So we rolled out of our firm mattresses (seriously, some one show the Chinese a western style mattress) and headed on down to our included breakfast. Nothing special but not too bad either. With food in our bellies it was off to Tian'anmen square at about 10:00am.
Tiananmen Square is a large city square in the centre of Beijing, China, named after the Tiananmen Gate (literally, Gate of Heaven's Pacification) located to its North, separating it from the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square is the largest city square in the world (440,000 m² - 880m by 500m).
The Tiananmen Gate to the Forbidden City was built in 1415 during the Ming Dynasty. Towards the demise of the Ming Dynasty, heavy fighting between Li Zicheng and the early Qing emperors damaged (or perhaps destroyed) the gate. The Tian'anmen square was designed and built in 1651, and has since enlarged four times its original size in the 1950s.
The year after Mao's death in 1976, a Mausoleum was built near the site of the former Gate of China, on the main north-south axis of the square. In connection with this project, the square was further increased in size to become fully rectangular and being able to accommodate 600,000 persons.
I think most tours of China should start in Tian'anmen square, to me it embodies so much of China all in once place. The square is a massive concrete area between two ancient gates, the Tian'anmen Gate with a 1.5 ton picture of Mao hanging from it and the Zhengyangmen gate. 1950's utilitarian styled government buildings lie to the east and west of the square. Only slightly behind the Monument to the Peoples Heroes stands Mao Zedong's mausoleum surrounded by statues of overly patriotic and determined peasant youth standing guard.
I have been to Tian'anmen Square twice now and both times in the off season, but the square is always packed. Huge groups of Chinese tourists with color coded ball caps follow tour guides carrying flags. Chinese families from Beijing and much farther away stroll the square looking just as out of place as I do. And a select few Chinese tourists, who have never seen someone with fair hair and skin before, will even stop to stare at my strangeness or even come in close to get a better look and see what I sound like. Sharply dressed military men walk smart patrols around the square while big brother watches with a plethora of cameras pointed in every conceivable direction.
This sheer size of the square, the massive numbers of people, the Beijing haze, the Chinese flags waiving in the breeze, the militant architecture, Mao's massive portrait, the cameras, the patriotic statues, Mao's Mosoleum containing his embalmed body, people trying to sell fake watches... to me, it symbolizes all that is China. The whole experience of walking around Tian'anmen Square gives you a snap shot of what China is all about, at least for a tourist, a foreigner. China is like the Texas of the world, go big, bold and brash or go home.
____ TV screens
However once you have made a circuit around the square, most people take the pedestrian subway across the street to the Tian'anmen Gate. Once you pass beneath the iconic portrait of Mao Zedong your transported into a different era of China. The big, bold and brash feeling is still there, but upon entering the Forbidden City your transported back to a more artful, perhaps graceful time.
The Forbidden City was the Chinese imperial palace from the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty. It is located in the middle of Beijing and now houses the Palace Museum. For almost five hundred years, it served as the home of emperors and their households, as well as the ceremonial and political center of Chinese government.
The Forbidden City is the world's largest surviving palace complex and covers 178 acres. It is a rectangle 3,153 ft from north to south and 2,470 ft from east to west. It consists of 980 surviving buildings with 8,707 bays of rooms. The Forbidden City was designed to be the centre of the ancient, walled city of Beijing. It is enclosed in a larger, walled area called the Imperial City. The Imperial City is, in turn, enclosed by the Inner City; to its south lies the Outer City.
Construction lasted 15 years, and required more than a million workers. Material used include whole logs of precious Phoebe zhennan wood (Chinese: 楠木; pinyin: nánmù) found in the jungles of south-western China, and large blocks of marble from quarries near Beijing. The floors of major halls were paved with "golden bricks" (Chinese: 金砖; pinyin: jīnzhuān), specially baked paving bricks from Suzhou.
After being the home of 24 emperors — fourteen of the Ming Dynasty and ten of the Qing Dynasty — the Forbidden City ceased being the political centre of China in 1912 with the abdication of Puyi, the last Emperor of China.
The Forbidden City was declared a World Heritage Site in 1987 by UNESCO as the "Imperial Palace of the Ming and Qing Dynasties", due to its significant place in the development of Chinese architecture and culture. It is currently administered by the Palace Museum, which is carrying out a sixteen-year restoration project to repair and restore all buildings in the Forbidden City to their pre-1912 state.
The Forbidden City is done on such a grand scale you could easily spend days inside taking pictures and admiring the buildings without ever seeing the same thing twice. It is a place one can easily get lots in, with a maze of corridors, courtyards and gardens all equally as dazzling. Most buildings are painted a vibrant shade of red with glazed yellow roof tiles topping them.
Many visitors are often seen snapping photo after photo of rooftops in the Forbidden City, myself included. The sloping ridges of building roofs are decorated with a line of statuettes led by a man riding a phoenix and followed by children of the dragon. The number of statuettes represents the status of the building — a minor building might have 3 or 5. The Hall of Supreme Harmony has 10, the only building in the country to be permitted this in Imperial times. The ceilings are also elaborately painted not only with vivid colors and gold leaf but also with paintings and art.
The grey stone used for all of the flooring, stairs and walls is rather drab in contrast to the riot of color used in everything else. If an artist is able to get a brush onto something then it is vibrantly painted, and if it isn't painted then it is decorated in molded glazed tiles. Clearly no expenses were spared in the construction of the city. Tourists are left with an over whelming sense of opulence, to rival that seen in Europe, though of a very different style.
But with so much to see, we had very little time to see it. We only had time to see a few of the highlights in our perhaps 3 hour tour of the Forbidden City. Our tour guide Summer took us to some of the most famous highlights, but we also missed a few of my personal favorites from the last time I came such as the Palace of Tranquil Longevity and the concubines quarters. However with such a late start we had to be realistic about what we could and could not see in the time we had.
After our brief tour of the Forbidden City it was back to the van and off to go and get some food near the Temple of Heaven. Once we had arrived at the restaurant I was a bit surprised, turns out I had eaten at this tourist trap of a restaurant last time I came to China. The place is designed to look like "Imperial" with red lacquer and some bridges etc, it is also designed to feed bus loads of tourists in short periods of time. Fortunately we had missed the lunch time rush and found ourself pretty much the only people in the restaurant.
Bring the food pornographer that I am, and Mel the replicative cook we took excellent notes on what we ate everywhere in China. Today we dined on Fried Niangao with Leek and Shredded Pork, Pan Fried Jiaozi stuffed with pork and leek, Jiaxing Zongzi (Rice and pork wrapped in a bamboo leaf and steamed), Pumpkin Milk Soup and Sautéed Bok Choy with Mushrooms. Over all the food was just okay, but I was impressed with the Niangao as I had never tried it before. It was apparently served Shanghai style and resembled disk like noodles that we a little chewy and held flavor well. The rest of the dishes were what you might expect from a tourist trap, nothing bad but nothing too special either.
With full bellies we were off to see the Temple of Heaven, which after seeing it the first time I always thought was a little bit of a let down for all its hype.
The Temple of Heaven, literally the Altar of Heaven (simplified Chinese: 天坛; traditional Chinese: 天壇; pinyin: Tiāntán) is a complex of Taoist buildings situated in the southeastern part of central Beijing. The complex was visited by the Emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties for annual ceremonies of prayer to Heaven for good harvest. It is regarded as a Taoist temple, although Chinese Heaven worship, especially by the reigning monarch of the day, pre-dates Taoism.
The Temple of Heaven was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998 and was described as "a masterpiece of architecture and landscape design which simply and graphically illustrates a cosmogony of great importance for the evolution of one of the world’s great civilizations..." as the "symbolic layout and design of the Temple of Heaven had a profound influence on architecture and planning in the Far East over many centuries."
The original building was burned down by a fire caused by lightening in 1889. The current building was re-built several years after the incident.
The Temple of Heaven is much smaller than one might have assumed after seeing the size of the Forbidden City. It has also been rebuilt several times, much of the complex is rather new and recently restored, though restored to its original design.
However it is upon closer inspection that the temple becomes a bit more interesting. The round central temple, almost 125 feet tall, was built without nails. Using elaborate beams and a fascinating bracket system the entire three roofed structure sits rather solidly, and has for nearly a century. There are also several specially designed acoustic areas in the temple, usually easily identified by tourists shouting in them, even though a whisper can be herd.
The first area where this can be seen is the Circular Mound Altar where the Emperor would pray to the heavens. While closed now to the public, I saw it in 2008 and got to experience the sound amplification, a neat trick with construction. A whisper becomes speaking voice, a shout becomes thunderous. The second place is called "the whispering wall", or so my guide called it in 2008, this was along the outer perimeter wall and a conversation on one side could be heard clearly on the other side, well across the courtyard and without the other parties knowledge. This area was also closed off of this visit, a huge disappointment.
My two favorite parts of the Temple of Heaven are the ornately painted support beans and brackets inside the main complex and the 3 tired marble railings and drain spouts leading up to the main temple complex. Both are hard to miss and main features of the temple, but I think I could spend hours studying both. While the Temple of Heaven isn't all that grand, it makes up for it in magnificent construction and attention to detail.
____Supper and bed
Accommodations: Sunworld Hotel, Beijing (4 star)
Phone: 010-65138822
Fax: (86)01065139095
Address: 88 Dengshikou, Dongcheng District, Beijing, 100006 P.R.C
Web: Http://www.sunworldhotel.com.cn