Forbidden City
This is the entrance gate into the Forbidden City, the Meridian Gate.
As you can see from this photo, even though the Forbidden City is enormous, it was very crowded throughout.
Hall of Supreme Harmony from the Gate of Supreme Harmony
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.
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.
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 Hall of Heavenly Purity
You don’t realise how vast the Forbidden City is until you have been walking for a while and realise that you still haven’t reached the inner private areas of the Emperors.
The interiors were very murky, no internal lighting. I bet it’s changed by now.
This is a pair of intertwined trees. Admiring them is to supposed to bring lasting companionship.
The gardens were very formal, but at least you could sit down and rest in them. There were really massive goldfish in this pond.
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.