We next visited the much livelier Beihai Park, just west of the Forbidden City. The park was built in the 11th century, and was part of the palace's gardens, until opened up to the public in the 1920's. Most of Beijing seems to visit here on the weekends, and there's plenty to keep everyone occupied. There's an 11th century Buddhist temple, an elegant waterside pavilion, and a huge lake filled with paddle boats. We participated in none of the fun.

Jingshan Park rises from the back of the Forbidden City. It's a fake mountain in this otherwise flat city, built from the leftover dirt from the moats surrounding the Imperial complex. But it's main purpose was to ensure good feng shui. Feng Shui dictates that it's lucky to live on the southern slope of a hill, and all previous imperial palaces had been so placed. Since that wasn't possible in Beijing, a hill had to be built to ensure the imperial family's continued prosperity. The park isn't particularly interesting, although it has a couple Buddhist temples at the top. Also, the last Ming emperor hanged himself here in the seventeenth century, if that makes it more interesting. Doesn't say much about the promises of feng shui though.

Towards the back of the complex the rigid design scheme of endless courtyards loosens up a bit, as various emperors added some gardens or other personal touches to make the place a bit more human. There's also an audioguide commentary by Sean Connery which is actually quite good, and adds some more warmth to the sea of stone here.

After the Communists took over, they weren't quite sure what to do with the complex. Initially, apart from hanging a big Mao painting off the front, they left it alone, at various times they planned to raze the whole thing and build either a people's park, or a mega bus/train interchange on the space. None of this came to pass, but during the Cultural Revolution some of the most famous buildings in the complex were leveled to make room for a display of mud sculptures of revolutionary heroes. When I visited only about half the place was open, but the government recently announced a twelve year restoration plan to restore the site to its imperial condition. I don't think it will help if it just makes it bigger by opening up the other half I didn't see, but if they restore the interiors as well it could be quite a sight.

Another reason for the sterile feeling, apart from the lack of trees, is the lack of things generally. For such an enormous place, there are relatively few rooms, and in fact I'm pretty sure you never go inside any room in the whole complex. Most of the rooms are large, ceremonial rooms in the center of each of these massive barriers, with sappy names like the Hall of Eternal Harmony, the Hall of Perpetual Harmony, and the Hall of Harmonious Union... you get the idea. As the emperors degenerated into opium addicts in the nineteenth century, much of the treasure housed at the palace was stolen by the palace eunuchs. When the last emperor was thrown out of the palace in 1924, the remaining treasure was displayed here in a museum, but again much of that was lost to the Japanese during World War 2, and much ended up being taken by the departing Chinese army fleeing to Taiwan, where it still resides. So what little is left is totally insufficient to fill all this space.

In addition to being impossibly grand, it's also remarkably sterile. The basic idea is that you walk in the main gate, with the famous portrait of Mao Tse Tung (added since the time of the emperors). Then there's a massive, stone plaza, and a huge staircase leading up to another ceremonial building/gate. This in turn leads to another huge plaza, and another building, and it goes on pretty much forever. As you'd expect from the name, nobody was allowed in the complex without the emperor's permission, but that permission would also dictate how many of these gates and plazas you could cross, with nobody ever allowed to enter the back half of the complex, the Inner Court, where only the emperor and his immediate family lived. Throughout this whole arrangement, there are barely any trees, with almost all the plazas paved in stone.

We took a taxi early Saturday morning to the Forbidden City, for many centuries the seat of the Chinese emperors. The complex is astonishingly large, eight hundred buildings arrayed along massive plazas. It was built around 1400 by a workforce of 200,000 happy campers over fourteen years. Much of the construction involved huge pillars and staircases that were constructed elsewhere but were far too heavy to move. So they flooded the streets throughout China each winter, and then moved these massive pieces over the resulting ice all the way to Beijing.