Since the Forbidden City is fairly centrally located, much of modern data city life surrounds it now, which takes away from some of the beauty. You can see that I wasn’t able to take a picture of the building overlooking the Forbidden City without also taking a picture of power lines.
Here is the back entrance into the Forbidden City. It got its name because it was forbidden for anyone other than the emperor and his concubines to enter the city. If there were any male help, they would have to be eunuchs. To quote the great Captain Jack Sparrow, "Snip snip!"
There were lots of large pieces of stone throughout as decoration. Every stone has a story and probably brings good luck. It seems as though every tradition the Chinese has is due to wanting to have better luck.
The city takes about 2 hours to walk through from one end to the other, so it was quite large and intricate. There were several buildings throughout that would either be the living quarters of the emperor, different concubines, or where the daily affairs would take place. There was also a building that housed the potential concubines for the women that were vying at the opportunity. Below are pictures of some of these buildings.
My roommate for the trip, Eugenie Lum, is in the middle, and another student Jennifer Woods is on the right.
Apparently they even had big screen TVs back then! :)
Here is a picture of one of Beijing’s skyline. Apparently the media was not allowed to broadcast pictures of it during the Olympics because it would show the haze. Beijing is so spread out compared to most cities in the US that there wasn’t just one skyline that really stood out.
While the Forbidden City was in use by the emperors, no buildings were allowed to be built larger than any of the buildings in the Forbidden City. That obviously is no longer the case.
The throne.
These are the stairs heading up to the throne.
Here is Steve, our TA. He’s originally from Shanghai so he was actually a tourist in Beijing along with the rest of us. This is the front of the Forbidden City across the street from Tiananmen Square. Mao Zedong is the one in the photo in the background. In order to get to Tiananmen Square, you must go in a tunnel under a street. They were checking the bags of the local Chinese citizens, but they let us and other foreigners through without a baggage check. The few Chinese people in our group were able to get through with us as well. I found it interesting they would essentially profile their own kind before they would profile us.
This reminded me quite a bit of Native American totem poles. I guess they are all over the world.
This picture was necessary to really explain gawking we encountered while there. The Chinese man in the middle of this photo was not part of our group but was instead staring at us, in particular a black student in our group named Edyth. When we first arrived to the Forbidden City, a Chinese person walked up to her from behind and a friend took a picture of both of them from 20 feet away, without asking her permission. She didn’t realize it was happening until it was done. Throughout the rest of the trip similar things would happen – sometimes they would ask permission to take a photo with her or others, and sometimes they wouldn’t. My picture was taken by two men that asked our TA’s permission first. I had a hard time understanding why they wanted our pictures. I know that since Chinese and other Asians are so much thinner than us in general, I thought they wanted to bring home proof how much fatter us Americans are. I soon found out that when these people see Americans, they tend to be retired, so they aren’t used to seeing young foreigners in such a large group. We have about 30 people in our group in total.
This is Tiananmen Square. It’s really hard to take a picture from ground level because it is so large, but you can get the idea at least.
Tiananmen Square.
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