In The Forbidden City with the Forbidden Hemline

Monday, March 16th, 2009
4:30pm
Aloft Hotel, Beijing

Back from Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City! Whew! What a day!

The Forbidden City was AWESOME. I mean... WHOAH!!! I got my own private tour guide for only around $15, and he walked me through nearly everything. It was brilliant!

I was so impressed with the size of it all. Every new gate led to another that was even more impressive than the first, and the buildings that the Emperor and his wife and consorts lived in were undeniably fascinating. I am SO glad that I had a tour guide. He was excellent, and shared so many fascinating details!

For example, he explained to me that the giant vats all over the place were used for fire control. Some of the vats were gold-plated, and all of them were slightly raised so that in the winter, fires could keep the water from freezing. How cool is that??
He also pointed out that the giant carved marble slab was brought over in the winter so workers could dig trenches, fill them with water that subsequently froze, and slide it along.
Oh! And he told me that the strange looking rock in the garden were brought from the bottom of a lake. These people are INSANE (in a very lovely way, of course).
I loved all of the architectural detail. The cloud and dragon motifs were dreamy and powerful. The association of north, south, east, and west with both the seasons (winter, summer, spring, and autumn) and elements (water, stone, wood, and metal- earth, the fifth element, is always right below your feet) makes perfect sense. Oh, and just couldn't help but go ga-ga over the amazing attention to detail. The locks, the clasps, the flourishes, the archways.... they left me utterly starstruck.


I found the whole Empress and Consort system to be very interesting... and perplexing. There were so many concubines! And they all must have been so bored! I wonder how catty it got amongst them. I bet things got pretty ruthless at times, especially since they were striated into so many different ranks. V. stressful.

Speaking of stressful, I had one of those major freakout moments when I first went out today. EVERYONE was starting at me, and I swear, I could just FEEL everyone's eyes on me, even when I would away from the crowds! What with all the attention, I started wondering if I was having one of those dreams where you show up at school without your clothes on, but nope, my little purple dress was firmly in place. What I soon discovered was that it was that whole "little" thing about the dress that was getting all that attention. Heheheh... Apparently they don't wear little dresses in Beijing...? Yeesh. I didn't realize. I was so excited about it NOT being twenty degrees that I thought I'd be fine in this dress... siiiiiiigh.

Seriously though, the last time I got this many stares, I was wearing my cupheads helmet that I made after the Loco design I saw on Japanorama.

Once I got over the stigma of being the most scantly clad creature in the Forbidden City, I found the whole situation rather amusing. I mean... I can't even tell you how many people asked me to pose for pictures with them!! WTF??? After a while, I took to asking these people if they'd take a picture with my camera, so as to document the hilarious results (such as documented in the previous post). Siiigh... what is this world coming to?
Photography definitely is the #1 activity in the Forbidden City, and for a good reason. Aside form the history art, and architecture, there is top notch people watching!




The popularity of photography definitely flows over to Tiananmen Square, though over there, it made more sense, because there's not much else to do. For the most part, you're only going to get a thrill from Tiananmen Square if you have agoraphobia, but as I'm a total fan of people watching, I loved it. Everyone was pulling out their best glamor poses. It was priceless!




I got back to the hotel without a hitch, despite the fact that I have zero language skills. So far, I'm really liking China! Hurrah!