This is the entrance gate into the Forbidden City.
The Forbidden City is a series of Gates, leading into Courtyards, leading into Halls, repeatedly, each of which is of greater importance than the prior ones.
As you can see from this photo, even though the Forbidden City is enormous, it was very crowded throughout.
I got this vast sense of scale throughout our holiday. From the size of Tiananmen Square (the largest in the world), to the Forbidden City (biggest Palace complex in the world), to the Great Wall of China (longest in the world), to the Three Gorges Dam (largest in the world) and to other sights, this overwhelming size of the place is a particular memory I have of China.
The umbrellas are for shade against the sun, not the rain.
There are series of guardian roof dragons along the edges of the roof ridges. The more such dragons, the more important the building - and they don't come much more important than the Hall of Supreme Harmony.
The interiors were very murky, no internal lighting.
The gardens were very formal, but at least you could sit down and rest in them.
This is a pair of intertwined trees. Admiring them is to supposed to bring lasting companionship.
This photo was taken on a hill at one end of the Forbidden City. You can see how poor the air quality was - it is pollution not mist that that shrouds the scene.
