Forbidden City Pictures

There is a river running around the Forbidden City as well as through the southern portion of it. You have to cross bridges to get into the city as well as between the southern gate and the rest of the city. Often the bridges come in sets of five for the five pillars of Confuscianism (I think).

The Forbidden City is like the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco in that it is eternally undergoing restoration. There is a team of workers who, by the time they make the full circle around the city, have to start back at the beginning because it's time for another restoration. While they work on the temples, they cover them with this semi-transparent board, and they also print a vague picture of what the temple looks like on the outside so you can kind of tell what should be there. I was reminded of the first time I saw the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: it was under construction and so was covered in some sort of board, but the board had a picture of the gate printed on it with the gate columns covered in soccer socks!

A picture of some of the thousands of tourists there the same day. I have never seen so many umbrellas in one place in my life, although they really are everyone in Beijing. Pale skin is prized in China, so many people walk around with umbrellas all the time to keep the sun away from their skin.

Most of the temples are built in this style. The building in the corner has a double roof, which means it was very important.

This is Kristen and me on the other side of the temples shown in the previous picture. We had a hard time finding someone who could understand that we wanted our picture taken with a certain temple in the background. It took several tries before we got the picture that we wanted!

This pathway is still blocked off to tourists. It was only allowed to be walked on by the royal emperor.

The emperor would walk down that pathway from this temple to the next one for important ceremonies.

You can see here the large amount of open space, and this was one of the smaller sections. There were much bigger squares of empty space in front of the more important temples.

These next pictures are from the Imperial Gardens in the north end of the Forbidden City. The buildings are much closer together, and there is no empty space; there are trees (like the one above) and rocks and flowers. It was beautiful.

I am not entirely sure what this building was used for, but the inside was an ornate open space with a tiered circular ceiling. The Chinese believed that Heaven was round, so many of the prayer rooms and buildings are circular on a square base (square for Earth).

This is just a cool statue in the gardens.