Our travels brought us today to Beijing's Forbidden City in the "National Day Golden Week" - a week when all Chinese are off work and most, it seems, travel to Beijing. The week is to celebrate the founding of the Communist Party. A most auspicious time to travel, although not, it must be said, uncrowded.
Basically every Chinese person floods to Beijing to visit Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Exactly what we were doing.
Everywhere we looked were thousands upon thousands of people. Many had come in from rural areas and were dressed in their finery. Others were tourists, like us, hot and bewildered by the masses. Tiananmen Square, that symbol of protest, is now home to endless hawkers, and Mao Zedong, leader, revolutionary, Marxist, is an image to be hawked - on wrist watches, postcards, playing cards and of course lying in state in his mausoleum. I'm not sure how happy Mao would be to find his image being used to sell cheap goods to capitalist Western tourists but we picked up a few things anyway.
The queues to see the great man were too long to contemplate so we headed into the Forbidden City where we couldn't even see where the queue began or ended.
The queue became a running theme of the week. The basic concept of a group of people applying order to themselves seems quite interesting in china. Perhaps there is a chaos in the heart of the peoples' people that is responsible for all the queue cutting we witnessed? At the Forbidden City we witnessed the largest queues we have ever seen. Thankfully there is no denying the power of the steel bars that squashed the poor crying children into single file against their will.
Two hours later we were through its golden auspicious gates. The city progresses through large grand public spaces and into inner sanctums where in days gone past, only Emperors, their families and most trusted consorts would have been allowed to tread. The palaces are sumptuous and lavish and gilted, yet with a feeling of disuse. They need to be filled with grand robes, pomp and ceremony.
Many areas were named in the most auspicious exaggerated ways, like the Palace of Complete Happiness (which was where the concubines lived). We also liked the Palace of the Drinking Festival.
By the time we got home we were monumentally tired, especially because we hadn't had time to drop off Sophie's huge pack after she arrived. Bu Rou!
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