Tiananmen Square is the largest city square in the world. It is in the very centre of the city, and there is a line down the middle. I did a Homer - "now I'm in east Beijing! Now I'm in west Beijing!" The square is just a big area of pavement. There are people flying kites, an enormous war memorial and a flagpole.

The square is surrounded by important buildings - just behind the flagpole was Tiananmen (gate) and the Forbidden City... also the mausoleum with Mao Zedong's body, a defense force museum, a building where officials meet, etc. It's really the heart of the city.

Across the road from Tiananmen Square was Tiananmen (gate), through which was the entrance to the Forbidden City. We went into the gate - that is, climbed the stairs to get a good view out over Tiananmen Square.

Then we went through another gate and into the Forbidden City. Man it was huge. A series of huge courtyards with a giant, pagoda-style building in the middle and other same-style, smaller buildings encircling the courtyard.

It just went on and on. Its size was amazing. Lots of beautiful, but similar, old Chinese buildings. Some photos include the big, beautiful central buildings, rooves of buildings, a fancy, carved ramp made from a single block of stone, the emperor's bedroom (once had, I think, 27 beds so no enemy could know which the emperor was in. He was only allowed to keep a wife with him there for two hours maximum), a park in one of the courtyards...

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Then after lunch in a nice restaurant, we went to the property of the once richest man in China, the so-called 'Prince Gong'. We got a guided tour (of which I understood not a word ^_^.) of the place - gardens with lots of fancy pagodas and covered ramps and old-style buildings.

Central lake in Gong's garden
The lake was iced over but there was a guy with a broom breaking the ice into chunks. Apparently this was so there would be a ready water supply in case of fire - so many wooden buildings!

The main theme of the place was 'fu' - a character meaning something like happiness, success. It's made up of about six simpler characters. This is a lucky word, and the word for bat (pian fu) contains that word 'fu' so bats are thought to be lucky. There were 9,999 bats decorating the tops of the buildings. It was illegal to have 10,000 (that was a right reserved for the emperor?) but Gong had a secret, 10,000th 'fu' - the character, engraved in a rock wall. We saw this and touched the glass over it for 'good luck'. (Another luck thing - one ramp leading upwards signifies promotion - the faster you walk up it, the quicker you will rise in life. Mei *ran* up! ^_^.)

[Note: Reading up on this place, I'm not sure if I understood what I was being told very well. I only got a little translated... but I read that actually, the 'fu' is famous because it is calligraphy done by the emporer himself. So maybe it's not true that it was hidden?]

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After that we went back to Tiananmen Square for the 4:45 (corresponds with setting sun) flag lowering. Had to wait 45 minutes in the cold just standing there, to get a good view. But it wasn't too bad at all. The flag was lowered, accompanied by soldiers marching in and standing at attention. We hobbled, stiff-legged, back to the bus.

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Misc notes: They were filming something in the Forbidden City. There are a number of historical dramas (movies and series) filmed there and on Gong's property. There were a couple on TV tonight, even.

The Forbidden City used to be symmetrical - same number, shape and size of buildings on each side. Now the left side is larger. There are 2555 rooms, I think - a baby could sleep in a different room each day for 27 years.

There are cool, draping trees that only emperor's places can have (illegal for normal folk to grow them) - they look like dragons' feet, and dragons represent the emperor.

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One thing about China - it's interesting. Everything has a story, a history.

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Then we went to some tombs of an emperor; I didn't pick up much about this place, don't even know what it was called. [It was one of the Ming tombs.] I think Mei was tired from our early morning and didn't want to translate much, but she still told me some interesting things.

The actual tomb is underground on a hill behind where the tourists go, but it can't be opened or the exposure will destroy the stuff within. As you walk towards the tomb, you pass, respectively, a museum, a gate, and a brick building with this emperor's tombstone, a big, tall stone.

The museum held artifacts removed from an emperor's tomb they *had* opened. It was one of those big, pagoda-style traditional Chinese buildings I've seen a lot of already. Inside it had a great, blue-patterned ceiling, many enormous, rare tree trunks supporting it as pillars, and a store. I bought a souvenir sword for 18 yuan ($4), Mei got it down from 35 yuan ($8).

Beyond the gate was said to be the 'underworld', where the dead dwell. So it's not good to walk through the gate toward the tomb, only through the gate toward the museum. Otherwise it's like you're entering the underworld. Also, you can't step on the threshold of the gate (represents death?). So we walked around the gate to the tomb.

There, we saw the brick building housing the giant tombstone, and the hill beyond where the tomb actually was. The bricks of the building had names engraved in them, some of which you could still read. The story behind this is that the names were of those who had made/laid the bricks. If a brick should crumble or be damaged, the person responsible for making/laying it would be killed. This gave the workers incentive to make the bricks really well, which is why they have lasted 600 years.

I must say, that place was really nice for the 'underworld' - peaceful, many many brown-leaved trees... but it was easily the coldest place we've been yet!

After lunch we drove to... da da da, the Great Wall of China. The site we went to was near the place where Meng Jiang Nu's husband died building the Great Wall.

[Meng Jiang Nu is a famous women; her husband was conscripted to build the Great Wall. She was worried about him and went to look for him, travelling along the wall, asking about him all over the place. Finally she came to the spot where people were able to tell her he was killed during constuction. She went to the emperor and so bothered him with her crying that he had a house built for her just near where he died so that she could be 'near' him.]

Apparently there is a dead body for every metre of the Great Wall. That's how many people died in its construction - every metre built represents one death. [Over a million died. And it was built in 15 years, wasn't it?] The Great Wall is the only man-made structure to be seen from space, and the only person to travel the whole way along it was a foreigner, and it took him over a year.

The mountains before and around the Wall were cool; I don't remember having seen mountains before. Earlier in the day it was so foggy we couldn't see out of the windows but by this time we could see the misty mountains. ^_^.

The Wall was cool, sprawling up and over the mountains, with flags all along it. We climbed up a portion of it - I went to the top! It was very exhausting just to climb it, let alone build it! The steps were pretty steep. Although the weather was cold (but there was actually some sun, miraculously - the only blue sky I saw today!) I was hot and drenched with sweat after reaching the top. Mei wisely waited lower down. ^_^.

[We went to a portion of the Great Wall which had been opened to tourists, known as the Badaling site of the Great Wall. When I say I went to the 'top' I mean that I went to the top of the stretch of wall that went up a mountain, stopping near the barrier that people couldn't go beyond.]

The toilets by the Wall had no toilet paper, no flush, no water... they cost 30 jiao (6c) to use. I've now used squat toilets twice, they're kind of dirty and gross - just a hole in the ground, and you throw your toilet paper in the bin there. Balancing is a bit precarious and I don't wanna touch the ground with my hands, but otherwise it's okay, I can easily get used to them; I sort of nearly am already.

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Summer Palace, where the emperor and empress would stay in summer. Empress Dowager Cixi the famous evil chick. [One of the 'evil women' of China's history, she kind of controlled the country when her son was technically its ruler, turning on him and controlling him.] Used to bathe in human milk - had about 30 women at a time for that purpose - because it was so good for the skin.

Summer Palace had a huge (frozen) lake, old-style buildings, the longest pathway in the world (of this style, anyway) which had over 5000 unique pictures painted along the beams on the top. [I could have happily dawdled along that bridge but as usual we had to keep a pretty brisk pace; I barely glanced at each picture and still fell behind!]

I took I photo of a feng shui stone in the Summer Palace. In old times, lots of big stones were more a sign of wealth than money, as it took so much work and expense to move the stones. This stone was originally owned by another who fell into financial difficulty in trying to transport it a long way. This original owner died so the stone was thought to be bad luck at first, but the emperor wanted it anyway. [I write down things like this so that I can remember what some of my photos are and why I took them.]

[I remember the Summer Palace as very unsummery, it was foggy and dull - because of the weather - and very cold. Most famous places were a bit dull in colour because of the weather, like the Temple of Heaven.]

[One of the activities on our itinery was to see the site of the Beijing Olympic village - they included this by saying "look out the window, there it is" as we drove past. So I've seen it but I don't even know what it looked like - I saw the outlines of a few buildings but I didn't know which one it was, and it was very foggy so I could hardly see anything anyway]

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The Temple of Heaven was even colder than the tomb yesterday - there was a kind of wind, veeery cold.

The story behind its construction... China had had a three year drought and things were bad. The emperor had a dream where he was told to "send the empress to pray for rain". So he sent her off to this site, specially chosen (it was a 'shining hill'?), on the condition that she could only come back when the rain came. The empress was excited to be out of the Forbidden City for the first time, so she didn't get serious until the third day, when she realised her position. She prayed for rain all the third day but it didn't rain.

The emperor got worried and went to find out after her, but she was dead from exposure and lack of food/provisions. [I don't wonder she died from exposure, that place is freezing in winter!] The emperor was grieved to find her dead, and cried, and the gods were grieved to see his sorrow, and sent three days of heavy rain to the region.

So the emperor decided to erect a proper place on that site, with shelter and so on, to pray in the future. There are buildings with altars and sacred stones and so on, as well as the spot the emperor actually knelt to pray, which has another story. He would pray for rain in the spring and thank the gods for the past rain in the winter.

The spot where the emperor knelt was not originally a design he liked. He gave the workers x amount of time to come up with a design or they would all be killed. The workers were worried. An old local man, a poor man, asked if he could have their food, and they let him because they were too anxious to eat. He wiped his mouth with an old, dirty handkerchief and threw it on the ground. One of the workers found the handkerchief and the design on it was perfect for the emperor's place of prayer - a central circle for him to kneel, with concentric circles around it. [They were in multiples of nine - the first ring around the central circle contained 9 blocks of equal size, the second ring 18, the third 27...]

Beyond the circles was a round wall with three buildings inside. The acoustics of the wall were such that cool echoes and voice projection effects were possible.

The bridge beyond that - the middle path was for the gods, the paths immediately on either side for the emperors, and so on; the further out you were, the lower your rank. See, there are loads of interesting things like that about Chinese historical sites. [We walked where the emperors walked, then gave ourselves a promotion and walked in the middle. ^_^.]

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