China - Part 6 - Forbidden City, South entrance to Meridian Gate

Here we go... I think I'm finally organized enough to start the three Forbidden City posts.

I wanted to start with an aerial view, courtesy of Bing.com/maps, so you can see what little area we actually covered. Heck, I was surprised when I finally got dialed into what I was looking at!  Worth noting is those blueish colored lines on the right side of the map. The overlay of streets on Bing was slightly off and I couldn't figure out a way to turn that "feature" off. The West Chang'an Ave is on the very right edge of this map. It's the big 8 lane road that separates Tian'amen Square and The Forbidden City.

As you will see from the maps that I will included in posts 2 & 3, we made a mostly straight line through the heart of the FC.  Onto the photos...

This is the start of the group of people who were enamored with our mostly Caucasian group of adoptive families. I would guess that the crowd eventually grew to about 5 times what you can see in the picture and was virtually surrounding us on three sides, with our backs to the big 8 lane road!  A little freaky, but mostly fun.

This is a shot of the Southern most wall (I would have swore that it was the Western wall...  hence it being labeled wrong on the map above.) of the Forbidden City. This is the wall that we get to see in America most of the time as it has General Mao's photo in between two Chinese texts that I don't the meaning of.

This is a better shot of the Southern Wall that I spoke of on the last photo.  Due to the angle of the sun at the time of the day/year that we were visiting, we have no good photos of the current Mao painting adorning the middle archway. That painting is redone every year, with slight changes.  The archways are significant in their height too. The central arch was for the exclusive use of the emperor. There was an exception to this rule though. An empress was granted the privilege of using this entrance only one time, on her wedding day. The smaller arch to the East was used by ministers while the smaller arch to the West was used by the royal family. The outside, and smallest arches, were used by petty officials. Us little people were forbidden to enter the city during the dynasties.

While passing over this, I figured that it was part of the main moat that you can see in the map above, but as I got myself right with that map, I noted that it was a smaller moat which is barely represented.  The funny thing is, when we crossed the "real" moat by the Meridian Tower, we had no idea that we were crossing it.  You can't see it from the inside.  Also, I recall our guide saying something about the red walls you can see here. They face South towards Tian'amen Square and if I heard her correctly, they could seat up to 22,000 people in "bleachers" on top.

Here is a great line of the "little people" entering the smallest of the arches.

This is right by the little building that you can see in the photo directly above this one. It's looking East down the back side of the "bleacher" wall.

Inside the archway.  It's a bit blurry, as are some other ones that you'll see from the FC, but it's the best one we've got from the arches.

This is the backside of the building that we just entered thru the arch.  I've tried to lookup what the statue is because it appeared several times throughout the FC.

I have no idea what this building was but it looked like it appeared to have been a very large and ornate janitors room/supplies closet.  Who's to say?

This is a shot looking, roughly, due West. Nothing too exciting in this photo but I did notice that there is a small building behind the tree in the left of the pic that has red and green digital letters on it...  I didn't see that while we were in there and now it makes me wonder what it is.

This is as we're entering thru the second set of arches. Nothing earth-shattering here either except for the fact that I really liked these big doors and would like something like this on our house!!  Maybe not, but they were sweet!  Heck, I've always wanted a moat too but it would have to be really deep, because I'm afraid of alligators.  Oh, and I would really like to have a tall tower on my house too so that I could be up in the tower and wear a cape while I was up there...  that's probably where I would feed the alligators from, just to be safe.

A closer view of the door so you can get an idea of the thickness and size of it.  If you pay specific attention to these doors with gilded doornails, you may discover that most of the gates have nine rows of doornails and each row consists of nine. Why 9? Because of the Beatles?  Nope. It's because '9' was regarded as the biggest number in ancient China and it was used to imply the emperor, resembling the imperial power in a symbolic sense.  Do I pretend to understand all of that? Nope, but neither do I pretend to understand algebra.

Here we are inside the next... uh... set of walls.  The architecture gets a little fancier as you get closer to the center, as does the clothing.  Dig the yellow and pink! 

More random buildings inside the second set of walls.  The grass you can see in this photo is some of the only grass that we saw in Beijing... poor dogs.

This is the Meridian Gate, the only true entrance to the Forbidden City now.  I'm just an idiot with corn sticking out of my ears, but I thought we were already inside the FC. Apparently that was not so.  I guess the extra layers may have had something to do with defense? Anyway, the Emperors thought quite highly of themselves, as "sons of heaven" and therefore thought that they should live in the center of the universe.  They thought the Meridian line ran through the Forbidden City and so the gate was named as such.  This photo also explains why we couldn't see the moat. It flows pretty much underneath the parts of the building that jut out towards us (on each side of the pic).  Completely undetectable from inside where we were.

I still haven't found out what these little symbols mean on the blue board which is in the middle of all of the roof lines as you go through the archways.  Take note of that as you look at further pics. The symbols change as you progress on through.  I'll continue to search for the meaning.

Even the buildings on the sides of the big areas are starting to get more fancy.  This is also the place where I realized that my toes were numb. The sun seldom shines on the ground where this group of people are standing so the snow was all trampled down and quite polished and slick!

I also do not know what the building in the background is. It doesn't seem to be labeled on anything that I've found yet, but again, I'll keep looking.

This is where I thought we were crossing the moat.  As it is, I think this is called something along the lines of the Golden Water(s).  There are five of these bridges which you can see on the map that is the first picture in this post.  It's just a little bit past where my red arrow ends and you see the curvy little stream through there.

That's it for this post. We'll pick up where we left off here for post #2.

Until then, be good and do good!