Tiananmen Square & The Forbidden City

Today we visited the famous Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City and it involved a lot of walking. We went to Tiananmen Square first and to be honest it was a little unsettling. As we drove to our drop off location our guide told us a little about the square and that it is a very sensitive subject (and place) in China.

Tiananmen Square is a large city square in the center of Beijing, China, named after the Tiananmen gate (Gate of Heavenly Peace) located to its North, separating it from the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square is the fourth largest city square in the world (109 acres) and has great cultural significance as it was the site of several important events in Chinese history.

Outside China, the square is best known in recent memory as the focal point of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, a pro-democracy movement which ended on 4 June 1989 with the declaration of martial law in Beijing by the government and the death of several hundred or possibly thousands of civilians.

Our van dropped us off out the National Center for the Performing Arts which is described as The Giant Egg and is an ellipsoid dome of titanium and glass, and is completely surrounded by an artificial lake. It is really a neat building and looks like an egg floating on water or a water drop.

From the Performing Arts Center we walked the short distance to Tiananmen Square where we had to go through a security check before entering the square. There were a lot of people there (by our standards anyway, by Chinese standards it was practically empty) and our guide told us about all of the aspects of the square (many of which I can't remember because I am playing blog catch up 2 months later).

Our guide Zhou - he is fabulous

From Tiananmen Square we walked to, and then through, the Forbidden City (I had no idea how large it was or how many buildings there were until we walked through it).

The Forbidden City was the Chinese imperial palace from the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty. It is located in the center of Beijing and now houses the Palace Museum. For almost 500 years, it served as the home of emperors and their households, as well as the ceremonial and political center of Chinese government.

Built in 1406 to 1420, the complex consists of 980 buildings and covers 7,800,000 sq ft. The palace complex exemplifies traditional Chinese palatial architecture and has influenced cultural and architectural developments in East Asia and elsewhere. The Forbidden City was declared a World Heritage Site in 1987, and is listed by UNESCO as the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures in the world.

After all of that walking we needed a snack so Zhou got us all this little treat which he told us were cherries basically coated in a sugar glaze. They were not like any cherries I've ever had (they were huge and the texture reminded me more of a strawberry), but they were good.

After our snack we hopped on the bus and headed to a late lunch (have I mentioned that the food in Beijing was delicious?). At most of the restaurants we visited in China the tables had these huge lazy susans (I totally want one for our kitchen table in now) in the middle and at all of the restaurants the food was served family style. The brown meat dish near the bottom of the first picture is duck and those two larger, darker pieces are the heads (although I tasted it I was not a big fan of the duck meat).

Tomorrow we head to Justin's home province of Jiangsu!!