China - Day 12

Saturday, July 25
Beijing

Saturday started out with a visit to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. This being a Saturday, there were large crowds there. In Tiananmen Square, people were lined up to visit Mao's mausoleum. The mausoleum is large with a gold yellow colored roof (which color, in previous times, had been reserved for the emperor).

(We tried to figure out where the student stood in front of a tank quite a few years back. And there was a wide street next to the square. .... Our tour guide didn't volunteer the info.)

Others, like us, were on their way to visit the Forbidden City. The first pic is a portrait of Mao hanging over the Tiananmen Gate entrance to the Imperial Palace grounds. We went through this gate and then the Meridian Gate, the southern entrance to the Forbidden City.

The Forbidden City is huge (178 acres -- .6 miles long by .47 miles wide). It took us a couple of hours to go from the southern entrance to the northern one. And we didn't look at even half the buildings there. In the background is the Hall of Supreme Harmony.

Here is one of the thrones inside the grounds -- in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, I think. It was the most popular of the sights there.

We also visited the Hall of Mental Cultivation, the Imperial Telephone Bureau, and the Imperial Garden among other sights there.

After lunch, we went to the Summer Palace. This picture of the palace was taken from Kunming Lake, which was created in order to get enough earth to create the hill on which the palace sits.

In the evening, we attended a show at the Beijing Night Theater. It included fabulous costumes, dancing, and acrobatic performances.