On our first full day in Beijing, we visited two major locations in and around the\u00a0enormously expansive Tiananmen Square. The security in the square is phenomenal: one can only enter through guarded points where Chinese citizens have their identity cards electronically scanned; at a further security point, all bags are x-rayed; and everywhere there are police and military, not to mention the plain clothes personnel.<\/p>\n
In the morning, we went to the National Museum of China. The building was completed in 1959 and the present museum – a merger of two former ones – was established in 2003 so everything is very modern. It receives 7.6 million visitors a year, making it the most popular museum in the world (just before the National Air & Space Museum in Washington D.C.). There are 10 galleries presenting the history of Ancient China from prehistoric times to the Ming & Qing Dynasties – everything from a burial costume made of pieces of jade linked by gold tread and a couple of the world famous terracotta warriors.<\/p>\n
Somehow I managed to drop my iPhone without noticing it and amazingly about half an hour later it was presented to me by a museum attendant who had searched the building for me. I have my name on the back of the mobile so it was clear that it belonged to a foreigner and, at this time of year, I was virtually the only foreigner in the place.<\/p>\n
In the afternoon, we visited the Forbidden City, entering on the north side of Tiananmen Square where the entrance is still dominated by a huge picture of Mao. The enormous complex is said to comprise 9,999 rooms (only God in Heaven can have 10,000 – a special number for the Chinese). The palace was the residence of 24 Ming and Qing emperors and ordinary mortals were forbidden to enter which gave the location its unusual name.<\/p>\n
This was my fourth time in this amazing location so I did not need to take many photographs and just savoured the experience as far as the cold would allow. But it was so bitterly cold (around -10C) that the wide moats were totally frozen and Hua\u2019s iPhone literally froze up. Again I was almost the only foreigner in sight and I was asked to be included in a photograph with a local.<\/p>\n
In the evening, we ate at a restaurant specialising in Beijing duck and enjoyed entertainment involving music, dancing, puppetry, juggling and more. A splendid end to a wonderful day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On our first full day in Beijing, we visited two major locations in and around the\u00a0enormously expansive Tiananmen Square. The security in the square is phenomenal: one can only enter through guarded points where Chinese citizens have their identity cards electronically scanned; at a further security point, all bags are x-rayed; and everywhere there are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-life-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22616"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22619,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22616\/revisions\/22619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}