We started the day off by going to Tiananmen Square after a 12-hour train ride from Xian to Beijing. Tiananmen Square is the biggest square in the world and within the square was the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City, built in the Ming dynasty, was home of the emperor and it’s name refers to that common people were not allowed to enter, the inner portion of the Forbidden City held the residences of the emperor empress and the concubines of which he could have up to 72. The outer portion of the Forbidden City was used for official business and ceremonies. The women were not allowed to enter this portion of the Forbidden City so the emperor built a garden in the back where the women could spend time. The garden contains many rocks from lake Tai which were hard to acquire and extremely expensive. In the Forbidden City we had to fight through a crowd of people in order to get a picture of the thrown where the emperor would sit and see the whole city. I thought that it was very interesting to see where the emperor lived for part of his life, but he didn’t live all of his life there. After the Forbidden City we went to Beihai Park where we walked around and looked at the nine-dragon screen, which actually had over six hundred dragons on it. Then we left the park and went to Hutong, which is the oldest part of Beijing. We had a bike tour around the town and at our only stop a bunch of people bought two-minute paintings of creative name art. We continued our tour, than went out for supper. Finally, we had free time around the hotel and some of us went shopping at the near by street market.
-Kristina
No comments:
Post a Comment