Forbidden City

Today we were busy, busy. We started out at The Forbidden city, followed by lunch, and a trip to The Summer Palace. We had been to The Forbidden City on our last trip- but I feel like we took in so much more this time around. Despite the size of the grounds, it has quite an organized structure. The ground was built of stone 3 meters deep so that someone couldn't dig their way into the palace. The walls are 9.9 meters high and 1.5 meters deep. The Emperor is very protected. The front of the palace grounds were built for the Emperor to conduct business, but only the eunichs and concubines were allowed in the back. Men were seperated from the women. The most fascinating thing to me was that the Emperor did not pick his concubine. The Emperoress picked the women. She always picked fat and ugly women so that she did not have any competition. Also, it was the Emperor's mother that would grant or not grant permission for the Emperor to stay with his wife. It seemed like the Emperor's mother really had the control. Here are some cool things we saw within the walls of the Palace.

You can seee the large stone carving behind us - it weighs more than 200 tons and is carved with lotus patterns and 9 dragons.


You can see the throne reflected in the mirror.


Since the Palace was built to protect the Emperor, trees were only allowed in the back near the exit. The garden of trees is called The Imperial Garden. here trees are 100-300 years old. Since fall is only just setting in, the Imperial Garden still had all its leaves (although most trees were conifers). The tree we are in front of the couple tree, two trees that have grown together. The Chinese believe that the trees are now a couple.



This is a picture of Deer park. The Emperor loved to feed the deer so t he had the rocks brought in from the bottom of some (I'm sure far off) lake, and are very porous. After it rains, the moisture escapes the rocks as fog and cools the garden.