The Forbidden City

The Forbidden City – Home of 24 Chinese emperors during Ming and Qing dynasties, nowadays UNESCO world heritage site. It is also the largest palace complex in the world covering in total of 74 hectares surrounded by a 52-meter wide moan and a 10-meter high walls. Yes, in China everything seems to be big.

First part of the palace is called the outer court which mainly served as ceremonial purposes and second part was the one where the Emperor and his family used to live and take care of day-to-day state administration. Of course if going more special than the main divide for two parts, there are also Six Eastern and Six Western palaces, Imperial Garden etc. If there is more than 8700 rooms, you might guess that there would be plenty of names to mention...

Entering through the gates into the Forbidden City a view of five small bridges crossing a water and after huge bronze lions guarding the stairs to the palace where the emperor used to sit down on his throne. All round the the Forbidden City there were many of those bronze statues because they were meant to scare the evil spirits away. I read before that recommended time of visit would be 3-4 hours but I thought it was slightly over timed, but after passing those gates (and few palace halls) I realised that it actually was a real estimate, maybe even a bit too less. That’s why this post is called part 1 because so far I saw main palaces, treasure hall and Qianlong Garden plus NW residence area…

What I didn’t see, for example Imperial Garden and “few” more other things, I just have to check later on spring. And in total so far my visit took around three hours and I would say that few more is needed. Now it wasn’t even a season time so I can imagine that during the season when the place is crowded it could take even more, because already now there was a need to few times fight the way through of taking a picture – being a tall in this case comes very handy ;-)

The main palace building had more or less same kind of architecture than for example Temple of Heaven had, but that is because both are built around same time and used for ceremonial purposes, for example yellow is quite dominant colour that can be seem even in roof tiles and that's because yellow colour represents power so it was also the main colour of emperor.  While walking around the area there was few times as we were stopped when someone wanted to take photo with us. Most nicest one was a Chinese family (or small group, who knows..) whose kids wanted to be in a picture with two tall Westerners. Those kids were so happy that smile on their ears were all way up to their ears, maybe they have now something to show in school for their friends. And yes, even in China, most of the tourist seems to be Chinese (at least on their family roots)

The treasure hall / Qianlong Garden part was worth of going. There were some jewellery, jade statues with amazingly detailed carvings (f.ex. one piece weighted 5 tons and carving work had took six years to complete) and a theatre stage which was for emperors amusement purposes, plus many other beautiful areas / rooms / palaces…

I will return on that place later on to see rest of the things but already one thing is for certain, that palace complex would be an ideal place to play hide and seek.