In the Forbidden City

May 12th, Thursday

On this day George took us to the city centre to visit the Forbidden City. A week later, at his instigation, I bought a DVD of The Last Emperor; a good proportion of the film is set in this vast, remarkable place and it gives you an inkling of how it must have felt to those inside it at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the reign of the Qing dynasty was coming to an end. Hard to imagine, now that it all belongs to the People's Republic and is swarming with tourists.

From the Wikipedia article:

Outside the walls: the moat

Jin, or "Forbidden", referred to the fact that no-one could enter or leave the palace without the Emperor's permission. Cheng means a wall, or walled city.

The old name for the Forbidden City is the zi jin chéng although nowadays Chinese people call it the gú gōng (former palace). The cluster of palaces in the centre of Beijing is surrounded by walls 10 metres high and a moat, the tongzi he.

Ming Dynasty guardian lion

The first palace was built in the early 15th century and during about 500 years was inhabited by twenty four emperors who sat on golden thrones surrounded by advisors and ministers, eunuchs, concubines and other servants. The commoners first saw inside the city in 1925 and still seem to have an ambiguous attitude towards it, dressing their only children as little emperors or empresses and pushing and shoving to take photos of the thrones. At the end of The Last Emperor, you see the former emperor approach the ticket office by the Meridian Gate to ask for yi jiang piao in order to revisit his former home as a tourist. On May 12th, on the same spot, George requested wu ge piao (for five of us) with great aplomb. Within the walls is a series of vast courtyards divided by temples with steps up to them with the balustrades in white marble, the red walls and pillars and yellow ochre roofs repetitive throughout. On each roof ridge was a dragon with a row of its young, on the terraces outside the doorways were a sundial and bronze heron and gilded water jugs of colossal size with monster heads round the handles. The jugs were a precaution against fire. Stone lions stood as guardians, the male one with its paw on a globe, the female holding a cub down. (We saw these lions all over Beijing, actually. There was a pair in front of our hotel ... and walking through Ottawa this afternoon I observed that there are two other such lions on the front steps of the Chinese Embassy, here!)

The Hall of Preserving Harmony had a sloping stone relief sculpture on its northern side, of dragons between two flights of steps, 16 metres long, extraordinary. The ceremonial ramp on the southern side leads to the Hall of Supreme Harmony, where the largest set of thrones is found, where the coronations and imperial weddings took place. In the Palace of Heavenly Purity (it struck me that we ought to find a more poetic name for our bedroom when we got back to Ottawa) the name of the Emperor's successor used to be kept in a sealed box.

We sat on a sunny bench in the inner court eating ice creams and wondering what to see next. Children kept coming up to Chris and saying "Hello, where you from?" ––girls wanted to stand beside him to have their picture taken. The little ones wore empress' hats bought from the gimmick peddlers squatting on the steps. Tour groups went by in same colour T-shirts or caps, dutifully following their leader who'd carry a flag.

Hall of Supreme Harmony from below

After a break in an American style coffee bar to the side of the great halls we chose to visit the Hall of Clocks which required an extra entrance fee. One old clock featured a "robot playing tricks," made in 19th century Suzhou and we saw several "striking clocks" from the Imperial Clock Making Studio, but most were (to us) more familiar looking products of the French or British Empire. Of the Chinese ones, there was a "tower clock with mechanical eight immortals," a clock case incorporating a map of the stars and an impressive boxed artifact showing "a robot writing eight Chinese characters with a writing brush" the actual clock being a hardly noticeable decoration on the side.

Our visit to the Forbidden City finished in the cedar gardens at the northern end, with picturesque standing stones, pavilions and roses. Exiting through the Gate of Divine Might we were confronted by a noisy, seething crowd, plenty of taxis lined up but none accepting passengers, apparently. This is the sort of occasion when the language barrier becomes a nuisance. Rob and Sally successfully hailed one in the end, showing the driver the printed phrase for "Take me to the Hornki Great Hotel," but to their disgust were conned out of ¥75. Chris, George and I only had to pay ¥16 when we finally managed to find a willing taxi driver, but by then we had walked quite a distance from the main road. George seems fairly used to this kind of challenge.

*****

In the evening Sally and Rob, Chris and I were all invited to visit Sha's family home where she and George were staying; it is only a three minute walk from the Great Hornki hotel. I see that I've written in my diary––"a lovely evening!" George had the key to the block of flats so led the way up the steps inside to where Mr. Du was preparing 200 dumplings for our supper, to be served with sliced meat and soup. We couldn't all fit around the table so the ladies ate first and when not eating we shared family photos and managed to talk about them, me using my inadequate Chinese as best I could; we saw little Sha looking sweet in her Young Pioneer tie as a schoolgirl (she was top of the class) and very pretty as a teenager.

A corner of the Imperial Garden at the back of the Forbidden City