We wanted to do something special – getting married being one of those things considered worthy enough to warrant something special, after all – and so we had a travel agent arrange for us to fly out to China in order to undertake a cruise on the Diamond Princess. We knew people who’d got married and spent a fortnight on a beach somewhere tropical but beaches bore us senseless. We knew we wanted to go abroad, we knew we wanted to experience the history and culture there when we did, and when we saw this cruise itinerary we knew that the chance to visit and get a taste for a lot of countries in one go was absolutely perfect. Princess Cruises had an option to spend three days before the cruise in Beijing with a number of excursions included and we eagerly took up the offer.

To give you some idea about how excited we were to be visiting a foreign country after all this time together the first photo I took was from the coach ride from the airport to the hotel and it’s of a parked car near a road toll gate. Other thrilling photos from the ride to the hotel include construction work and busy roads so make sure you’re seated before viewing them below.

The hotel that we stayed at was the Great Wall Sheraton.

We were handed our keycard and checked in.

You can see the view from our room in the video below (edit: no you can’t, as I’ve removed it for now). You’ll also be able to see some of Beijing’s famous smog against the buildings in the distance. We could tell that there was smog in Beijing but it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as we’d been led to believe, although that may partly be because our visit was just a few months after the 2008 Olympics had taken place when there’d been a concerted effort to reduce pollution in the Chinese capital.

After seeing the prices for food in the hotel restaurant we decided to eat elsewhere in the evenings during our stay and you can read about that in a separate post on Beijing Restaurants.

We only did a little bit of exploring in the area around the Great Wall Sheraton; the novelty of a foreign trip, our generally cautious nature, and the extremely different culture in the country we were visiting being contributing factors in our lack of bravery there. We’ve got a lot better since this first spot of overseas travelling. We even found an Irish pub in Beijing not far from our hotel and never went in! To be fair, it would have felt wrong to travel to China and do so at the time but, again, that’s very unlike how we are these days where the thought of visiting a place like that in a location like that appeals to us.

Not far from the hotel was a river with a bridge over it. This are made for some pleasant evening walks, especially so when the bats would come out and fly around.

We also had an encounter with a local Chinese man in this spot. His English was flawless and he asked a lot of questions about where we came from which we were happy to share and talk about. It was when he asked if we wanted to follow him to a little art shop down a small alley that we started making some excuses about finishing our walk first. There was probably nothing nefarious in his suggestion at all – we certainly came away from China with the impression that it was a very safe place for foreigners to visit – and it was likely exactly what it now seems like: an attempt to sell some art at inflated prices to rich, foreign travellers. If only we’d actually been rich and less timid we might have come back with an interesting souvenir of our time in Beijing.

We enjoyed our stay in the Great Wall Sheraton, Beijing, and our only regret is that we didn’t make more notes and take more photos at the time. We’d have no hesitation in returning and we’d probably be more likely to try the food in the restaurant as well as explore more of the nearby area should that ever happen.

They were both interesting though they were primarily used as sales pushes as a lot of these side-trips on excursions tend to be. This is not to say that we wouldn’t have bought some of the items on offer if we’d had the money because the stuff being produced was stunningly beautiful and we got to feel a quilt that was so soft we were within a whisker of making the arrangements to pay for it and have it shipped home.

Yuan Long Silk Factory, Beijing

Yuan Long is just to the north of the large parks in which the Temple of Heaven – our favourite place in Beijing – can be found.

While sales might have been the ultimate goal of the visit we still did learn a lot.

Tian Hou Silk Factory, Shanghai

Our first trip to see some of Beijing’s highlights took place surprisingly soon after with a bus turning up to take us all to the main site of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. Those games had taken place in August 2008 and our visit was in early November.

The first stop for us was the Beijing National Aquatics Centre, known colloquially as the Water Cube. Our bus parked up and we walked towards the building where there was a short wait while our guide went ahead to pick up the pre-booked tickets to allow us inside. Looking around we could see signs of the recent Olympics everywhere and two buildings other than the Water Cube dominated the local landscape: the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium where we’d be heading next, of course, and a rather odd-looking building called the Pangu Plaza office complex which was described as representing both an olympic torch and a dragon but which to us seemed to resemble a rabbit more than anything else. We’d get more photos of this building following our next visit in the city.

We weren’t the only tourist group in the vicinity but we were the only non-Chinese tourist group around which made us as much a point of interest for the other visitors as the sights we’d all come to see but that was okay with me as I found them equally interesting too.

Our guide returned and we headed inside. It’s nice to say that we’ve stood in the venue of an Olympic Games but to be fair there wasn’t much else to do other than peer at the pool and the seating and other tourists. The 2022 Winter Olympics will also take place in Beijing and the Water Cube will be repurposed as the Ice Cube to host the curling event so we’ll be keen to see how it all looks although it has already undergone an internal redesign since we visited in 2008.

Our guide had given us all ten minutes to look around but we were done in less than half that so headed back outside the aquatics centre to the designated meeting point. This did at least give us the chance to look more at the building itself and its very distinctive bubble patterning. The building had been designed by a consortium of Chinese and Australian firms with the idea for the bubbles coming from the Australian architects; the base design of a cube shape was a traditional Chinese style choice and represented the Earth while the nearby circular shape of the Olympic Stadium represented Heaven. The bubble covering is a fluorine-based plastic with high resistance to corrosion and better efficiency at allowing in light and heat than glass, part of the Beijing’s attempt to create an ecologically-friendly event.

It wasn’t long until everyone had come out to join us and once the headcount was confirmed we walked the short distance to the next venue, the Beijing Olympic Stadium.

Before we went inside we heard some of the design decisions from our tour guide, including that the planned retractable roof was removed from the design late in the process following safety concerns and that the interior had been subtly altered as a result to protect the crowd from the elements a little better.

Our position outside the national stadium entrance allowed us to look back beyond the aquatics centre and to the western sky where the sun was dipping in the late afternoon of this November day. This gave my wife and I the chance to hunt for a spot to take some photos with the Pangu Plaza “dragon building” (but it still looks like a rabbit to us) in the foreground.

One other thing we really enjoyed outside the Bird’s Nest stadium was the other tour groups and visitors to the Beijing landmark. Our guide had already told us earlier in the day that we might be a bit of a novelty to other Chinese people. Beijing was a modern city but a lot of the visitors who we would see at the tourist locations would be from other parts of China, coming in to see the site of the 2008 Olympics of only a few months prior, or seeing the Great Wall or the Forbidden City where we’d also be visiting over the coming days. We would in many cases be the first westerners they would ever have seen in the flesh and we shouldn’t worry about being stared at.

We weren’t just stared at. It was amusing to look at some of the other groups and see the local guide surrounded by two dozen Chinese people (all wearing the same cap to identify their group in a lot of cases), most of them paying no attention to what was being said and simply looking at us or, in some instances, sidling over to get close and see if they could hear some English being spoken. We also saw some people shuffle close in order to surreptitiously pose for photos for friends or family in front of our strangeness.

Our guide led us into the Bird’s Nest stadium and gave us some free time to have a look around. Access was pretty much unlimited although we weren’t too keen to get too far from our guide and the exit, with an eye on when we’d need to meet up outside again. TV screens showed promotional video from the Olympics and there was a loud buzz of conversation filling the interior space.

The central area of the stadium contained some mannequins dressed in clothing worn at either the opening or closing ceremonies of the recent summer games. Understated colours and subtle patterns were not the fashion of the time.

The mascots of the 2008 Olympics were also represented, albeit only two of them and in inflatable form. The five Fuwa (good luck dolls) each represented a ring of the Olympics logo and therefore a continental area taking part in the games.

• Beibei – Blue – Europe – Water
• Jingjing – Black – Africa – Wood
• Huanhuan – Red – America – Fire
• Yingying – Orange – Asia – Earth
• Nini – Green – Oceania – Metal

As you can see, both Huanhuan (America) and Nini (Oceania) were in attendance when we visited the Beijing National Stadium.

Outside the stadium once more I couldn’t resist a couple more shots of the setting sun and the deep colours caused by a little of that famous Beijing pollution (although it wasn’t that bad and never affected us during our visit).

It will be good to see the stadium and general area in use once more during the 2022 winter games just to see what’s changed. We had a lovely little visit and when you consider that most trips we do are of a far more ancient historical nature, it was good to have this first day of excursions arranged through Princess Cruises at the start of our honeymoon holiday in Asia be something very different.

Our guide led us the few minutes’ walk back to the bus where we’d be whisked (well, as whisked as Beijing evening traffic allowed) back to the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel, our home for these first few days in China.

As with elsewhere we visited in Beijing we found ourselves often the centre of attention from groups of Chinese visitors to their own capital too. Our tour guide explained that a lot of the people we saw would have come in from outlying areas of China and would probably never have seen non-Chinese people before. We found it quite amusing to see groups of people – often elderly – all dressed in matching caps to identify themselves paying scant attention to whatever their own tour guide was trying to say and slinking across to hang around near us, apparently to hear English being spoken.

The part of China’s arguably most famous landmark we visited was the Great Wall of Badaling, the most visited section of the wall, likely due to its proximity to Beijing, and the first part to be opened up for tourism in 1957. The area around Badaling these days sports hotels, restaurants, and train stations. In 1972 it was at Badaling that Nixon walked upon the Great Wall during his historical visit to China.

From our bus we walked onto a flat part of the wall and gathered around our guide to hear a little more of where we were. The Great Wall isn’t a single wall at all but many connected ones that partitioned off sections of the land and served multiple purposes: defence, immigration control, border controls for taxation, and quicker and more direct transportation across the land. The Badaling Wall was built in the early sixteenth century during the Ming Dynasty when most of the more well-known sections were constructed, although walls were built in China from as far back as the seventh century BCE, typically in localised sections until the first Chinese emperor connected them around five hundred years later.

It was during the Ming Dynasty that the Great Wall began to be truly fortified following defeats against and an inability to truly suppress the Mongols to the north of the country. Bricks and stone began to be used for the first time, turning the wall into a formidable and impressive defence against raids. Large watchtowers were built to allow for rapid signalling of attacks, and barracks and garrisons were put in place to allow for rapid deployment of troops.

After our guide had completed her general talk about the Great Wall she gave us a time to all meet up and indicated that there were options to either head up the wall on our own or to take a look at the visitors centre and shops. We hadn’t come all this way just to stand on a small section of wall – fabulous though that was – and, while we’d have loved to see the visitors centre if we had more time, this would be a fairly fleeting trip to this site and we wanted to make the most of it. From memory I would say that around half our bus opted not to walk along the wall and that can be explained by age with the pair of us at the time being the youngest on that pre-cruise tour by a couple of decades.

There were a couple of surprises with this part of the Great Wall of China. The first was just how wide it was in places; you could easily get eight to ten people abreast. You know that the wall is on a huge scale (even if the claim that you can see the Great Wall of China from space is only true with high magnification) but you only think of that in terms of length until you’re standing there. Secondly was the steepness and surface. The steepness varied as the wall followed the contours of the surrounding mountains, of course, but at times there were steps and others sloped paving. We found the sloped paving particularly awkward to walk up and quite how tricky it would be in the rain or if any part of it snowed over or iced over beggars belief.

At one point on the walk along the wall, as we stopped to give our aching calves a rest and catch our breath, I caught the eye of a Chinese man, a little younger than us and also standing with hands on hips and puffing slightly. Our view was briefly interrupted by another man, probably in his seventies or eighties, stomping between us upwards at a tremendous pace with no sign of effort on his face at all. My fellow rester and I both looked at each other, smiled, and shook our heads with admiration. Climbing the Great Wall of China was not a task for the young, it seemed.

Knowing how long we had until we needed to return to meet our guide, bus, and fellow travellers we allowed ourselves twenty five minutes of walking – with several rests and not a very high rate of speed, naturally; we’re not fit now and we weren’t fit then either – to get as far and as high as we could along the Great Wall of China at Badaling. The views were fabulous when we finally decided we’d need to head back.

We probably had enough time to make it another one or two fortified towers further along the Great Wall and I recall seeing at least one person from our tour bus doing just that but we were happy enough with the short distance we’d managed to cover. I absolutely wouldn’t hesitate to come back for a visit with more time to head along further or to see another part of the wall but we were extraordinarily pleased with what we achieved at Badaling. Only a couple of days before this point neither of us had left the country together nor had we done so separately without parents, and it was quite remarkable to find ourselves standing on a section of the Great Wall of China, seeing hazy mountains disappearing in folds towards the horizon.

We headed back down, taking care especially on the sloped sections of the wall, and I made sure to grab photos along the way of the surge of tourists from all over China doing just what we’d done.

Our descent took around fifteen minutes which is testament to just how much more effort we’d expended heading up. At the base we had a chance to stand around and wait for a few minutes while our group of fellow, pre-cruise passengers slowly congregated, and for our guide to do a head count half a dozen times. On the hillside nearby there was a sign of the recent Beijing Olympic Games that had taken place; we’d visited the National Aquatics Centre and the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium just the day before.

From our meeting point at the base of the wall we were then led to where the bus would swing around to pick us up, an area featuring a contrast of architecture with the modern eruption of buildings to service the tourism industry in this part of the world.

The bus ride back to Beijing took another hour and afforded us a different view of the Chinese landscape as we headed away from the incredibly impressive Great Wall of China. I’ve never been one to take many photos from buses because I don’t like the dirt and reflections and inevitable issues with ensuring fast enough shutter speed that come from accounting for motion but there were a couple of interesting views I snapped on the journey too.

Our immediate next stop was to a restaurant which, like most it seems, was guarded by a stone lion. A combined post about the meals in Chinese restaurants that were included in this pre-cruise tour can be found here: Beijing Restaurants.

The afternoon of this second day in the Chinese capital would see us pay a visit to The Summer Palace.

A little bit of history of the Summer Palace because everyone likes a little bit of history just before they see all the pretty pictures and get some good old-fashioned wanderlust coursing through their veins.

The Summer Palace can date its origins back to the middle of the twelfth century although at that time it was simply the site of some minor palaces and temples taking advantage of the natural springs and lakes nearby for pleasing views. It wasn’t until the Qing dynasty and late into the eighteenth century that serious expansion of the lakes to improve water supply to the city took place and the transformation of the area into a collection of imperial gardens, palaces, and temples as the Summer Palace was completed. The design of the palace grounds was grounded in Chinese mythology with dragons and mountains represented, but maintenance of the complex was high and it soon fell into disrepair.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century French and British forces looted the palace during the Second Opium War. The nearby Old Summer Palace was burned down at this time on the orders of Lord Elgin (son of the other Lord Elgin, famous (infamous if you’re Greek) for his appropriation of the Elgin Marbles for the British government) in retaliation for the Chinese torturing and murdering European and Indian prisoners. The twentieth century saw the Boxer Rebellion cause serious damage to the palace (although it was restored soon after) and, after the Last Emperor (you might have seen him in the movie of the same name) abdicated, the Summer Palace became first private property and then a public park. For a short period after the Second World War the Summer Palace housed the Central Party School for the Communist Party.

The history lesson is over.

We arrived on the eastern side of the Summer Palace and our visit of a few hours was only enough to take in a very small section of the area. You could easily spend over half a day here if you were staying in Beijing. We started off with a visit to the Renshoudian. Also known as the Hall of Benevolence and Longevity this was a collection of buildings – temple, palace, halls with ancient artifacts – around a courtyard garden area filled with bronze sculptures and large rocks called Taihu Stones.

The Taihu Stones and their distinctive shapes are formed by the action of pebbles constantly rubbing on larger rocks through rushing water action creating holes in the larger structure, and were considered lucky. Many were brought to the Summer Palace at great expense.

A prominent bronze sculpture caught many of the tourists’ attentions. This was a Qilin. Often translated as “unicorn” the Qilin clearly isn’t one because I’ve got the ability to count horns and can reach the number two with consummate ease.

You’d be hard-pressed to tour an ancient Chinese site and not see some motif or relief work representing dragons and we weren’t disappointed with some of the stone decorations on show in this first section of the Summer Palace that we visited.

From the Renshoudian we headed roughly southwest towards the lake that makes up most of the Summer Palace landscape. This took us through the Wenchang Pavilion, constructed like a huge city gate and with a nearby hall containing more artifacts.

We didn’t stop at the pavilion as Kunming Lake was our destination. It’s possible to hire boats for personal use, either pedal or electric-powered ones, but there are larger vessels that can take groups of tourists on circuits of the lake too and it was the latter option that our Princess Cruises-organised tour directed us to.

A quick apology here for the state of the photographs of Kunming Lake at the Summer Palace. Beijing is well-known for its smog, although our 2008 visit to China not long after the Olympics meant that pollution levels were pretty low during our three days there. However, with this being November and the sun setting reasonably early in the evening and there still being some smog, even if it wasn’t particularly noticeable to us at the time, a lot of the pictures taken before and during our boat ride around the lake ended up shooting into the low sun coming through smog and reflecting off water. The result is what you’ll see below for a lot of shots: washed-out colours heavily leaning towards the yellow and orange hues, and very little dark detail. As the saying goes, it is what it is.

We boarded a boat not far from Wenchang Pavilion on the east side of Kunming Lake. Looking to the north we could see a large buddhist temple. South there was a long bridge with numerous arches, and we would soon be sailing past both of them.

Our pleasant, gentle circuit of the shallow, artificial lake took place in an anti-clockwise direction so the first sight we passed was the towering complex on the northern shore. This was Foxiang Ge (Tower of Buddhist Incense, or Tower of the Fragrance of the Buddha). This building was one of those burned down by Anglo-French forces but later rebuilt and presently comprises three, eight-sided storeys on a twenty-metre-deep stone base. The temple houses a statue of the thousand-handed Guanshiyin Buddha.

West of the buddhist temple was a very unusual sight. This was the Marble Boat (also known as the Boat of Purity and Ease). Serving as a tea house with fabulous views over Kunming Lake now, this was originally a wooden structure on a stone base but like much in the area was destroyed by arson during the Second Opium War. Its reconstruction took place under the instruction of Empress Dowager Cixi and was likely through funds originally earmarked for rebuilding the navy. Despite its appearance and name, the Marble Boat is still made from wood but is now painted convincingly to resemble stone. It incorporates clever drainage systems that funnel rainwater through hollow columns.

The lake with three islands is important symbology in China and as we continued our scenic boat ride around the lake we saw numerous bridges connecting those islands. Interestingly, each bridge was very different in design. Of the smaller bridges that we saw the one that stood out most was Yudai, known as the Jade Belt Bridge. Made from marble, its shape is designed to resemble the simple bridges of the southern Chinese countryside but its unusually high clearance was a deliberate feature to allow the Qianlong Emperor to pass under it on his dragon boat.

The largest of the bridges on Kunming Lake is visible from pretty much any point along the lake’s shoreline. Shiqi Kong Qiao gets its name from its design, the literal translation being Seventeen-Arch Bridge. The bridge is one hundred and fifty metres long, making it the longest bridge in any Chinese imperial garden, and it connects the mainland to Nanhu Island. The railings on the bridge incorporate five hundred stone lions in different poses. A variety of halls, temples, and towers dotted the small island, each filling a scenic location on the landmass in which to enjoy the views of the Summer Palace in every direction, and as we gently motored past Nanhu on its north side we passed Hanxu Hall which directly faces the Buddhist tower on the shore of the lake.

Stepping ashore we had time to see one more interesting item before departing. The Kunlun Stone Tablet is inscribed with a poem written by the Qianlong Emperor and describes how the shores of the lakes changed during his years of coming to the Summer Palace and especially enjoying his time on and around Kunming Lake.

And that brought our time visiting the Summer Palace in Beijing to a close with just a short wait outside the main entrance while we waited for our bus to find us. It was a short visit of only a couple of hours that really barely scratched the surface of what there is to see at this tourist spot. If I were returning now then I’d like to have spent more time in the buildings looking at the artifacts on display and a look inside the imposing Buddhist temple would be a must too, but as a taster of what to see and as part of a combination of historical trips in one day in the pre-cruise package hosted by Princess Cruises then this was a fantastic trip.

We would have just one more day in Beijing before our cruise on Diamond Princess but it would be a very full one indeed.

Tiananmen Square dates from the seventeenth century and was built around the location of the Tiananmen (Gate of Heavenly Peace) which was ironically destroyed in fighting during the transition phase of the Minq to Qing dynasties. The area’s present-day form of a public square housing a monument and surrounded by important buildings is thanks to Mao Zedong whose mausoleum is also found in the square and who envisaged the largest square in the world. It’s not that these days but it’s still an impressively large and open space in the middle of Beijing directly to the south of the Forbidden City and, if you’re Chinese, it’s famous for nothing at all of any significance occurring in June 1989.

Not only was Tiananmen Square the first of the day’s sightseeing stops, it was also the shortest of our organised activities. If you were to visit Beijing on your own then the buildings surrounding the square could easily occupy a significant portion of your day, I’d imagine. Sadly, our excursion only included a fleeting visit and we didn’t get a chance to see them, nor did we get a chance to pay a visit to Mao Zedong’s mausoleum, the reason for many Chinese people to visit the square, and our time was spent mostly just taking photos and enjoying the experience of simply being there.

Our bus from the hotel dropped us off at Guangchang East Side Road and our guide led us across the street into the square where a few of the buildings were quickly identified and we were given a short period to wander off on our own with a meeting time and place explained. There were plenty of people about but not, it has to be said, anywhere near as many as there could be. The time of morning and this being a November played a part here certainly and our guide had explained that on a typical day when busloads of visitors would arrive from all over China and the rest of the world, the queue to view inside the mausoleum alone would be hours-long.

Eyes were immediately drawn to the large monument roughly in the centre of Tiananmen Square. This was the Monument to the People’s Heroes and, as it stated on the plaque facing it, it was constructed between 1952 and 1958 from granite and white marble.

On the north side of the square the view was taken up by the distinctive red walls of the Forbidden City where we’d next be exploring. The portrait of Mao was hard to miss.

To the east of Tiananmen Square, where our bus had dropped us off and where we’d be meeting again before moving on, was the National Museum of China with its distinctive facade. Sadly, the view of the building was somewhat spoiled by the cranes dominating the skyline behind it. Formerly the Revolutionary History Museum this is one of the most visited art museums in the world and is certainly a place we’d love to visit if we ever get a chance to return to Beijing.

The large building to the west of Tiananmen Square was the Great Hall of the People, used for legislative functions and ceremonial ones including celebrations and memorials. Both the Great Hall and the National Museum, as well as the expansion work on Tiananmen Square itself, were part of the Ten Great Buildings plan, itself part of Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

In the southern section of Tiananmen Square was the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong, resting place of the embalmed body of the former Communisy Party Chairman (despite his wishes that be be cremated). Like everything else around the square it’s something we’d have loved to have spent time looking at but this pre-cruise visit to Beijing could only fit so much in. Sets of sculptures of revolutionary people were on either side of both the north and south entrances to the mausoleum.

Our free time generally involved an aimless, casual wander through the square, snapping photos and soaking in the experience of simply being in China, and keeping a close eye on the time, of course. We made sure we could always see the meeting spot so we’d know when people from our tour group were starting to gather but otherwise it was thrillingly relaxing to simply be mingling with hundreds of Chinese people, many in tour groups themselves, with lots of typical tourist activities taking place around us; pointing at buildings, peering at pamphlets, posing in front of structures for photos, etc.

It was as we were in the northern part of the square taking a few more photos of the wall on which Mao’s face was hanging that I suddenly felt a tap on my elbow. I found myself facing a pair of Chinese women, perhaps in their early twenties. In pretty good English the first one asked me if she could pose next to me for a photo to be taken by her friend. Now, we don’t like having our photos taken at all, and it’s why you will find it difficult to find any video or pictures of us on the internet (although they’re there, if you know where to look), but attractive Chinese women halfway around the world turn out to be my kryptonite when it comes to avoiding photographic capture and all I could do was smile and agree.

With small bows and thank yous the two women walked away and I turned to my wife who was also posing for a photo with a Chinese person. I then turned a little further and discovered a queue had formed of people who wanted pictures too. For the next few minutes we found ourselves the centre of attention in Tiananmen Square for people tired of grabbing shots of the surroundings and excited at snapping the elusive Western Tourist instead. This was 2008, of course, and I imagine things are not quite the same these days, but it was a fascinating experience if still a little unnerving to think that somewhere in China there may exist photographic evidence of our visit to Beijing and the fact that we won’t combust when posing for pictures in the possession of complete strangers.

It came time for us to gather at the meeting spot outside the national museum, something we did nice and early because we didn’t want to be the people holding everyone up back then, an attitude we retain to this day.

Once heads had been counted our guide then led us off for the next part of the day’s excursion in Beijing, a walk of just a hundred metres or so to the Forbidden City.

We entered through the Meridian Gate, the largest of the gates into and out of the Forbidden City. This gate comprises three central arches and two either side of them, with the centremost of the central arches being the largest and formerly reserved for the Emperor. They had big emperors back then, I’m guessing.

This brought us into the southern section of the Forbidden City, known as the Outer Court. The first area we found ourselves in was a large, open courtyard area with buildings left and right, a winding, artificial stream crossing the space spanned by ornately decorated bridges, and a gate with a large hall beyond it directly ahead. Naturally, this was a very popular tourist destination so the interior of the palace complex was filled with a throng of people, almost all of whom were Chinese, some undoubtedly local to the Beijing area but many, as we’d discovered on other trips, who would have come from all over China to visit the country’s capital’s historical sights.

The Forbidden City was constructed between 1406 and 1420 to be the state residence of the emperor from the Ming to the Qing dynasties (until 1924). The outer walls, themselves protected by a moat, are packed earth strengthened with bricks, but the interior buildings comprise enough wood to have the complex regarded as the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures in the world. Those buildings number just under a thousand, with the majority of them being in the northern section of the structure. The layout of the Forbidden City roughly follows a wide central route north to south with side-routes consisting of additional halls and palaces either side, and as has already been mentioned, there is an approximately even split between the more ceremonial southern section (the Outer Court) and the more residential Inner Court in the northern portion. With only a few hours allocated, our visit to the Forbidden City would mostly see us take a direct, central route from the southern gate to the northern one.

Crossing over one of the several bridges we approached the Gate of Supreme Harmony. Although not obvious to our eyes, this gate was a later addition to the Forbidden City with the original structure having burnt down in the late 1880s and the building now present having been reconstructed in 1894. Either side of the approach to the gate were bronze lion sculptures on white marble plinths. To the left was a female lion, identified by the lion cub under her left paw and representing abundant offspring for the emperor. To the right was a male lion which had a globe under its right paw symbolising ruling the world.

We passed through the gate and into the next courtyard area which led towards the largest hall in the Forbidden City and one of the largest wooden structures in China, the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Like all wooden buildings it is susceptible to fire and needed to be rebuilt in 1697.

Time to draw attention to something you might or might not have spotted and which you might or might not be interested in but about which I might or might not care whether you do. Official buildings – palaces, some temples, some government buildings – were permitted to decorate the sloping edges of their roofs with lines of figurines. At the front is a man riding a phoenix while at the rear is an imperial dragon, and in-between are a number of figures, with more important buildings having more figures. The maximum number of figures is nine but the only building in China to have ten, as you can see in the photo below, is the Hall of Supreme Harmony because it housed the emperor’s throne. The tenth figurine is unique in Chinese architecture. The colour of the roof tiles is also significant as yellow was reserved for the emperor, hence nearly all the tiles in the Forbidden City being that colour.

Around the great hall were bronze sculptures of turtles and cranes, both representing longevity. These were constructed with hollow interiors in order that incense could be burned for ceremonies, with the smoke rising from the creatures’ mouths.

A symbol that caught our eyes on more than one occasion was the swastika which in Asian countries still represents longevity and divinity but which, of course, in its right-facing, tilted variation has taken on a far more unpleasant meaning in the west.

We passed through the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Some photos were taken inside but with it being a lot darker than the exterior and flash photography not being allowed and us shuffling along with the crowd in a way that made it difficult to stop, they didn’t really come out well at all, and I’m far too much of a perfectionist to share their blurry noisiness with you.

Outside, as we gathered ahead of making our way through the northern section of the Forbidden City, I panned my camera around and snapped a shot which happened to be a Chinese girl talking to a boy of a similar age. Now, the thing about my camera is, it’s noisy. That mirror snapping back for the shot can be very loud in some situations and this was obviously one because the girl spun around at the sound and faced me. For one heart-stopping moment I thought I was about to start an international incident on our very first trip abroad together but to my utter joy she flashed me a big smile and adopted a pose instead. I swung the camera back up, snapped again, we both smiled at each other, I bowed because that’s the kind of thing you do when you’re flustered, and, yes, this still remains one of my most favourite memories of all the travelling we’ve done around the world.

The next major building we came to was the Palace of Heavenly Purity which indicated that we’d crossed the imaginary line between the northern and southern sections of the Forbidden City, meaning we were now in the Inner Court of the palace complex. This was the residence of the emperor for a long period and featured twenty seven beds that were slept in at random as a security measure.

Our tour of Beijing’s Forbidden City then veered off from the direct route south-to-north to pay a quick visit to some of the buildings to the west of the Palace of Heavenly Purity. This included the Hall of Mental Cultivation in which the emperor’s bedroom was located after the tradition of picking a different bed from twenty seven every night became too tedious to follow. The open courtyards of the southern section of the complex were nowhere to be seen in this part, with narrower alleys compressing the crowd around us more, but there were plenty of opportunities to see some close-up details of the architecture and design present.

The final part of the Forbidden City we took a look at was the Imperial Garden. This was a compact space for the emperor’s family to relax in, with a number of pavilions dotted around and attractive plant-life as you can imagine (or, if you don’t fancy imagining it, as you can see below). Many of the trees in the garden are hundreds of years old and there are items that appear to be trees but which are really stone. The major pavilions represent the four seasons in one way or another.

We might have had more time to explore some of the Forbidden City buildings – maybe not; we perhaps just overran our time anyway – but at this point on our excursion we were asked by the tour guide to all gather together near one wall and not move. The reason for this was that one member of our group had gone missing; an older, American gentleman. Our tour guide and the missing man’s wife headed off together and we were quite some time waiting before they returned with him in tow. Getting turned around, especially in the maze of alleys in the Inner Court wouldn’t have been too difficult so we could understand this and felt some sympathy, although that sympathy would be stretched a little over the course of this trip to Asia as he managed to get lost again on the following day and twice more while actually on the cruise ship.

All together once more we made our way from the garden and through the northern gate, the Gate of Divine Might, which offered up a lovely view of Jingshan Park. Jingshan Park was originally private gardens for the emperor but was opened to the public in 1928; its main focal point is the hill which is artificial, having been made from the soil excavated to create moats and lakes elsewhere.

After a break for lunch in a nearby restaurant the final attraction on the full day’s tour of Beijing would be a ride to the Hutongs and a visit to a local’s house.

Westerners tend to be larger and heavier than the Chinese people we were encountering and cruise passengers tend to be a little heavier too so there’s plenty of praise to be levelled towards the pedicab drivers whose job it was to take couples of us from near the restaurant to our destination. Our driver was probably happy to see that we weren’t the largest in our group although we certainly weren’t the smallest either.

The video (removed for now) below contains much of the pedicab ride through the streets of Beijing towards the Hutongs and gives you an idea as to how much traffic there was to contend with at the start as well as some sights of the attractive lakeside area close to our destination. I’d like to be able to tell you exactly where in Beijing this was all shot and where we specifically went for this trip but I didn’t think to make a note of that information at the time and it’s not that easy to work out from looking at maps now. My best guess is that this is close to the Qianhai Lake area.

At the conclusion of our pedicab ride to the Hutongs we had some time to wait until all the passengers on this Princess Cruises-arranged excursion arrived so there was a chance for a few snaps of the area. It was very pretty, very peaceful, and probably not what you instantly conjure if imagining what China’s capital city looks like if you’ve not been before.

Once everyone had been accounted for we were then split into groups to each visit a different Hutong and learn a little about everyday life from the people in this part of Beijing. Our hostess was friendly and perfectly charming although she didn’t speak a word of English and all explanations and questions and answers came through our guide’s translations. The house was small, cramped, a little cluttered but homely because of it, and everything you’d expect from the age of the place; the courtyard for which the type of building is famous was surprisingly large and was used to house birds and grow vegetables. With the proximity to the lake and the overall size of the Hutong there was a lot of appeal to it and this visit was a lovely experience that’s to be recommended.

Our visit to the Beijing Hutongs concluded, we returned to our waiting pedicabs which would take us to the final stop for the day. A local man was holding a large grasshopper in his hand which was nice, I suppose.

The last stop on this full day excursion in Beijing was to… somewhere. I know, I know, that’s not terribly specific. In fact, it’s only the fact that I took some photos at all that I know we went somewhere because it isn’t listed on any of the documentation we’ve got for this pre-cruise visit to the city. I can tell from timestamps that it was only ten minutes away from the Hutongs by pedicab but whether this was a religious temple or an imperial palace or a public park or some combination of the three I can’t say. It’s a shame that this holiday was taken before the explosion of use of phone cameras as I would most likely have had one or two snaps at the time that would have encoded the geolocation but as it is all I’ve got are some photos of buildings, ponds, and sculptures to look at. If my guess about Qianhai Lake area for the Hutongs is correct then this might be the Haopujian gardens. Let’s just pretend it is. Wherever it is and whatever it is, it was interesting to see a Taihu stone present, reminding us of the day before’s visit to the Summer Palace.

Our trip to Beijing in 2008 took place in November so the days were short and the sun was starting to set by this time. As we made our way by pedicab for the last time to where our bus would return us to the hotel for the evening we received what I’d like to think was a salute from two workers in the doorway of a building.

The following day would be our last day in Beijing before boarding Diamond Princess in Tianjin and it would start with a fabulous trip to see the Temple of Heaven.