Asia

This morning we met Qing in the lobby at 8:00. We opted to take the Subway to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. We toured until about 2:00 when lunch became pretty important.

The square was an awesome size and filled with visitors, soldiers, students and vendors. We walked around the entire square. From there we started our walk through the Forbidden City. Lying at the center of Beijing, the Forbidden City, called Gu Gong in Chinese, was the imperial palace during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Now known as the Palace Museum, it is to the north of Tiananmen Square. Rectangular in shape, it is the world's largest palace complex and covers 74 hectares. Surrounded by a six meter deep moat and a ten meter high wall are 9,999 buildings. Need I tell you we only saw a minute portion!!! I had no idea the area was so huge!! Much of it is undergoing renovation right now.

The Forbidden City is divided into two parts. The southern section, or the Outer Court was where the emperor exercised his supreme power over the nation. The northern section, or the Inner Court was where he lived with his royal family. Until 1924 when the last emperor of China was driven from the Inner Court, fourteen emperors of the Ming dynasty and ten emperors of the Qing dynasty had reigned here. Having been the imperial palace for some five centuries, it houses numerous rare treasures and curiosities. Listed by UNESCO as a World Cultural Heritage Site in 1987, the Palace Museum is now one of the most popular tourist attractions world-wide.

Construction of the palace complex began in 1407, the 5th year of the Yongle reign of the third emperor of the Ming dynasty. It was completed fourteen years later in 1420. It was said that a million workers including one hundred thousand artisans were driven into the long-term hard labor. Stone needed was quarried from Fangshan, a suburb of Beijing. It was said a well was dug every fifty meters along the road in order to pour water onto the road in winter to slide huge stones on ice into the city. Huge amounts of timber and other materials were freighted from faraway provinces. Ancient Chinese people displayed their very considerable skills in building the Forbidden City. Take the grand red city wall for example. It has an 8.6 meters wide base reducing to 6.66 meters wide at the top. The angular shape of the wall totally frustrates attempts to climb it. The bricks were made from white lime and glutinous rice while the cement is made from glutinous rice and egg whites. These incredible materials make the wall extraordinarily strong.

Since yellow is the symbol of the royal family, it is the dominant color in the Forbidden City. Roofs are built with yellow glazed tiles; decorations in the palace are painted yellow; even the bricks on the ground are made yellow by a special process.

We caught a public bus from the Palace to the hutong neighbor hood where Qing lives. Our first stop was a local restaurant for our late lunch. We ordered a variety of items from the menu to share and once again we chose too many things. It was a FEAST but was discussed to be our favorite meal so far in terms of all the dishes. From here we had about a five minute walk to Qing’s home.

A hutong is an ancient city alley or lane typical in Beijing, where hutongs run into the several thousand. Surrounding the Forbidden City, many were built during the Yuan (1206-1341), Ming(1368-1628) and Qing(1644-1908) dynasties. In the prime of these dynasties the emperors, in order to establish supreme power for themselves, planned the city and arranged the residential areas according to the etiquette systems of the Zhou Dynasty. The center of the city of Beijing was the royal palace -- the Forbidden City.

One kind of hutongs, usually referred to as the regular hutong, was near the palace to the east and west and arranged in orderly fashion along the streets. Most of the residents of these hutongs were imperial kinsmen and aristocrats. Another kind, the simple and crude hutong, was mostly located far to the north and south of the palace. The residents were merchants and other ordinary people.

The main buildings in the hutong were almost all quadrangles--a building complex formed by four houses around a quadrangular courtyard . The quadrangles varied in size and design according to the social status of the residents. The big quadrangles of high- ranking officials and wealthy merchants were specially built with roof beams and pillars all beautifully carved and painted, each with a front yard and back yard. However, the ordinary people's quadrangles were simply built with small gates and low houses. hutongs, in fact, are passageways formed by many closely arranged quadrangles of different sizes. The specially built quadrangles all face the south for better lighting; as a result, a lot of hutongs run from east to west. Between the big hutongs many small ones went north and south for convenient passage.

Qing’s hutong faces south. She lives there with her mother and father. It originally belonged to her grandfather. The area was recently renovated by the government and her dad renovated their individual space. We were able to meet her Mom and Dad and take a tour of their home. They were most gracious and proud of Qing. We had ice lollys (popsicles) which were a great treat in the heat and headed out to the nearby boulevard to catch a cab.

We had about an hour or so to check out another mall area and then we caught a cab to the theatre where we had tickets for an acrobatic matinee that started at 5:15 p.m. It was an hour show of amazing performers. We were all drop-jawed for the entire show. The acrobatics were awesome and just about unbelievable!! The costumes were so colorful as well.

Taxi’s delivered us back to the hotel. We got a feel for the traffic and pollution on a work day!! After a few minutes the group headed off to re-visit the silk market. Once again… a long FULL day!!