Tiananmen - Royal Family Excesses

Day 13

Tiananmen / Beihai

We walked a lot this day, but we walk quite a bit everyday. We started the day at Tiananmen Square, which is huge. Apparently it’s the largest public square in the world??? I don’t know how to quantify the size, but it’s very large. We started at the Southern end of the square, called the Arrow Tower, to the north of that is the Mao Zedong Mausoleum (ya, creepy), and the Monument of the People’s Heroes, then various gates and whatnot (including the one with Mao’s pictures) until you reach the Forbidden City. It was all very impressive, especially considering how old it all was. After we made our way towards the Forbidden City, we walked along one of the hutongs on the west side of the Forbidden City towards Beihai Park. Beihai Park is a giant imperial park just to the northwest of the Forbidden City. It’s huge, and its use was solely for the royal family, but it is currently open to the public (for a fee). We ended up walking around the entire lake, which is pretty much the whole park, so we saw a lot of the temples and stuff in the park and it was very pretty, but it was a really long way.

After about 3 hours in Beihai we took a bus to the Temple of Heaven, but we got a call from Chandler’s mother when we got there and didn’t have enough time to go in. We ended up just walking around a bit in that neighborhood and Chandler ended up having an interesting conversation with a local man. We got another call indicating we were running late by this time, and we hopped on the subway to go to Chandler’s parents’ friend’s house, which would be our meeting place before heading to dinner.

Apparently we were really late because we were met on the sidewalk and right afterwards we jumped in cars to head towards a restaurant for some great food. They ordered too much (as usual) and I got to eat more Peking Duck. The dinner conversation was also fascinating as Chandler was translating some of it for me. All the people at the table were probably 40-50 and grew up very poor, and when they tell their children about not having enough food when they were young, their children don’t believe it.

We retired back to the hotel early and got some sleep because it was quite an exhausting day.

Day 14

Summer Palace

Today, Chandler, his parents, and I started at Summer Palace, which is about 20 km northwest of Beijing. This was like Beihai on steroids. It was a giant garden palace that an empress built for summer retreats in 1750. This was also solely for the use of the royal family. The centerpiece is a manmade lake about that is about a mile square (2.2 km^2) and the excavated dirt was used to build Longevity Hill at about 200 feet above the level of the lake (60 m). Think about those numbers for a minute, and remember that it is all man made… in 1750… ya… Apparently this empress funneled money that was meant to fund the Chinese Navy into the construction of this park, which turned out to be a bad idea later due to a lack of defenses. Lots more walking… There was also an impressive temple at the top of the Longevity Hill with a ‘thousand hand Buddha,’ which really only has like 30 arms. The park was beautiful, but daunting in size.

We stopped at a restaurant nearby for a little lunch and headed towards the Beijing Botanical Gardens, which were very pretty, but again, huge. There was another pretty cool temple in the BBG called ‘Wofo Temple’ with a sleeping Buddha. It was all very pretty, and we only saw a fraction of the Beijing Botanical Garden before departing.

From here we made our way to the Olympic Park area to snap some photos of the Bird’s Nest and other buildings. By this time we were all pretty exhausted, and we rode the subway back towards the hotel for some relaxation before going out to a casual dinner near the hotel.

That is all for now. Cheers.