This last weekend (didn't quite get to writing it up until now!) we finally made it to the Forbidden City (or as the Chinese somewhat prosaically call it, the "Palace Museum"). The Forbidden City isn't like the other tourist attractions in Beijing, they're sort of on the outskirts and a little out of the way. It's literally (!) in the middle of the city. All the ring roads run in concentric circles around it, it's definitely the heart of the city.
And as we discovered last time, it's always packed, totally full of mainly Chinese tourists. Still it was a reasonable day (just a little overcast) and we decided we should check it out before it got too cold. On our bikes we jumped and cycled the 25 minutes or so to the front. The main entrance to the palace is on the south side, between it and Tiananmen Square, so you get the tourists for both in the same place. There weren't nearly as many people as there were the last time we tried to get in, and it was about 18 degrees cooler as well so it was a much better day for the purposes of checking it out. Given we're here for another 9 months or so, it's pretty certain we'll be back so there wasn't the pressure to see everything in a single day.
The place is HUGE. It's divided into the front palace (below the steps) and the back, private one (above the steps). The division was so great that one of the Chinese words for important people translates to "above the steps". There are lots of courtyards (for lots of court I guess), heaps of red pillars and marble, lots of decoration. The major architectural parts seem to be from the 17th century (1650s or so) but it was started almost 1000 years before that and changes and updates happened right through to the early 20th century, with the greatest change being getting rid of the "Son of Heaven".
I said in my post about the Summer Palace that the Chinese and I have very different views on historical locations/objects and this was true to an extent about the Forbidden City as well. Most of the buildings were closed and the ones that were open had small windows to look at the inside. This was the case for most of the throne rooms (I think there were at least 4!), there were 3 smallish doorways at the front, opening into darkened rooms. The result was that there was a huge crowd of people outside each one, physically pushing one another aside to look in. I understand that culturally the Chinese have issues with queues and stuff, but it just seems to me to be a weird way to see a priceless historical and cultural relic. It was worse for Jane, at least I could see over people!
Although that part of it was a little frustrating (I cannot even imagine what it would be like on a busy day), I found the Forbidden City to be a much more rewarding place for me than the Summer Palace. There was a little more context behind the various buildings, cauldrons, statues etc and some places with less people where less restoration had been done where I could get a better feel for what it had been like before all the restoration work.
We also took the time to look at the "Treasures" exhibition (but not the clock museum :). It also gave a lot of context to the way that the people in the palace must have lived and how cut off they were from the realities of life outside. There was also a fantastic wall of decorative clay dragons. I think that was my favourite spot in the whole place, it was really fantastic to see.
We made our way out of the Treasures building and were trying to get back to the front where the exit to our bikes was when two soldiers were moving everyone out of the way on that side of the palace. They ended up herding everyone out of that side of the palace (the one we hadn't seen) and pushing them towards the exit. We ended up asking him how we could get back to the front and he just pointed towards the other side. So we made our way that way, against the crowd (not an easy task!) until we got near the front courtyard. All the way the people were just moving together, no one seemed to be concerned or even curious about why, very few other people seemed to have asked why this was happening. Very strange anyway. Once we got to the front, we were just about to go to the exit when we saw it was blocked off. We were walking to the exit on the other side when a guy stopped us (and someone else on a bike) and made us move back so a group of African guys in suits could come through (we'd have made it across well in front of them too). It looked like this was the explanation for why the whole place was shut down, because these 10 or so guys were getting a private showing at 3 in the afternoon. Not very nice for the rest of us really. They also made us leave by a door that added about 2-3km to our walk back to the bikes, also pretty disappointing.
So I did enjoy the Forbidden City, it is a pretty remarkable place with amazing architecture and historical significance. It was a little let down by the presentation part, but definitely worth visiting on a quieter day :)
There are some more photos here:
https://picasaweb.google.com/david.mutton/ForbiddenCity?authuser=0&feat=directlink
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