Beijing Part 3

Beijing: Part 3

It was my final day in Beijing and I was still yet to have gone into one of the city's principal attractions, the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City was for a long time the residence of the Emperor within Beijing and was named thus as it was forbidden for anyone to enter the complex without special permission from the Emperor. After imperial rule was brought to an end, the Forbidden City was given to public use and used to house many of China's ancient treasures from the course of it's history. Though many of the most revered treasures were evacuated to Taiwan when the Nationalists fled from the Communist Revolution, the Forbidden City still hosts a very impressive collection and was definitely a highlight of my trip.

We set off in the early morning, conscious of the masses of tour groups that crowd the tourist spots in Beijing over Chinese New Year. On our way to the Forbidden City, we looked over to Tiananmen Square, which was teeming with people already. Fortunately, it appeared that most of these tour groups had planned to cover the sites within Tiananmen first, as the Forbidden City wasn't too busy, and we didn't even have to queue, whereas we'd spoken to people from the hostel who'd had to queue for hours.

The Forbidden City itself is a huge collection of almost one thousand buildings, all of which are built in the same simplistic style and all a uniform red-orange with yellow roofs (yellow being the imperial colour).

Some of the buildings (like many in China) were guarded by these impressive looking lion statues on the outside.

I think this is the Hall of Supreme Harmony, although I can't say with certainty as, like I said, the buildings are all of a similar style. The buildings in the main square (after going through the front entrance) were the busiest part of the Forbidden City. The buildings here were roped off to the public, but the doors were open you could see the contents inside (such as the imperial throne). However, it was very stressful trying to get a look as this area seemed to be most popular with the tour groups and there were hordes of people all holding up their cameras, phones and i-Pads as they tried to get a peak/snap a picture of the interiors. 

Dragons, being the symbol of the emperor, were included in much of the decoration around the city.

After we left the main square, the tourists dissipated pretty much immediately and there was much more space to roam around. The Forbidden Cty was full of smaller paths which I thought were much more beautiful and pleasant to walk around, helped no doubt by the calmer atmosphere.

Along these paths were the entrances to various smaller buildings, within which there were different collections of ancient Chinese art, ranging from painting (there was a very cool special exhibition on the Buddhist arhats), bronzes, pottery and so on. As these galleries were not the main sites within the Forbidden City, the tour groups had obviously decided to give them a miss and they were nearly empty which was very nice!

One of the small streets within the Forbidden City. I really liked the decoration on the doors and at the top of the walls!

An entrance to a courtyard.

Some of the detail on the walls.

The corners of the roofs were all covered in dragons and lions (?) like the one above.

Eventually, we found this huge walkway, which led us to a large square which contained two big exhibitions on either side, the Hall of Clocks and the Treasure Gallery. Both of these required an extra ticket (only 1 pound) and were definitely more popular than the other galleries we'd visited. We decided to try the Hall of Clocks first, and after handing in our tickets, headed in!

The Treasure Gallery isn't just one room, like the name suggests, but a whole section of the Forbidden City, consisting of numerous buildings. The first thing you see upon entering is the nine-dragon wall, which, though busy, was fun to look at!

A close up of one of the dragons.

One of the walkways within the treasure gallery.

The treasure gallery contained a huge variety of treasures, ranging from jewellery (including a very impressive imperial headdress), huge thousand year old boulders with carvings on them, ceramics and jades. I've typically found jade to be a little boring here, but the jade collection at the Forbidden City was great with massive stones of jade that had been carved into to depict different scenes.

One of the main jade carvings.

The hall of treasures also had this well well, in which one of the emperor's most important consorts allegedly flung herself into during the turmoil surrounding the imperial family at the turn of the 20th century.

After seeing our fill of the treasure gallery (save a few pieces of the collection which were too busy with tourists for us to even try to get a look at), we headed out of the treasure gallery and to the entry of the Hall of Clocks. 

The Hall of Clocks contain a huge collection of clocks produced by British and European clockmakers for the Qing Dynasty emperors during the 18th century. However, to refer to the pieces in the collection as simply clocks would be a massive understatement. For many of the clocks, timekeeping was a secondary feature, while the main goal of the clockmakers was to show off their technical skills with what was essentially robotics. The clocks all had very intricate mechanisms inside so that many of them played scenes of people coming in and out of buildings at the turn of the hour. However, some of these went even one step further. There was one clock (though the actual timekeeping piece was very small) which was a sculpture of a man holding a brush which he would dip into a pot of ink and write four beautiful Chinese characters. Another clock consisted of an elephant which walked around the table swinging it's trunk and rolling its eyes. Though the clocks were all turned off (there was the option of a clock show later in the day), there was a movie playing in one room showing all of the clocks in actions and it was a lot of fun to watch!

Inside the Hall of Clocks.

The elephant clock which would have walked around, it's eyes and trunks moving as it went. Notice how small the actual clock is...

After seeing the Hall of Clocks, we decided to leave the Forbidden City and head on to our next place. This definitely seemed like a good idea as the full force of the crowds of tourists seemed to have arrived by the time we left and the whole area was getting uncomfortably busy.

At the back entrance of the Forbidden Ciry, there's a park known as Zhongshan Park which offers impressive views of the Forbidden City complex. We decided to have a quick look at this, and after entering the park and climbing many flights of stairs, we managed to get some great views of the Forbidden City and the rest of Berlin, made better by the uncharacteristically unpolluted air.

The Forbidden City from above.

For my last site in Beijing, I decided to head to Gulou area, a famous collection of hutongs which was full of shops and restaurants along with a huge Drum Tower and Bell Tower.

A Marilyn Monroe Statue we passed on the way.

A house built in to one of the hutongs. Notice the decorations on the door for Chinese New Year! The arhictecture of this area was very cool and definitely gave us a feel for the historic character of the city.

The Bell Tower

Though one guide book's description of Gulou being Beijing's version of Camden Town felt a little inapt, there were some funny looking shops like this scattered around...

The area was definitely busy and it felt like the quieter parts of the city were waking up again as people returned home and to work, the Chinese New Year break coming to an end.

We also saw lots of these food stalls selling this kind of candy which was made by blowing into sugar (similar, I think, to glass blowing).

Though a little expensive, so I didn't buy one, the animals were very impressive and really cool to check out.

Someone had a little too much fun with their fireworks?

The Drum Tower, from which Gulou gets it's name.

After walking up and down the streets of the hutongs, we decided to head back to the hostel before my flight back to Taipei the next morning...

The word for 'Goodbye' in Chinese is '再見' (Zai4 Jian4), literally meaning 'see you again' and I'm sure that I will see China again  in the future and further explore its fascinating ancient culture and history...