"The Forbidden City"

The Forbidden City was so named this because, for more than five hundred years, it was totally off limits to all except the rulers of China and their servants. It was the home to two dynasties of Emperors, the Ming and the Qing who strayed from the sanctuary of the city only if they absolutely had to.

Two hundred years ago the price for admission would have been instant death, however today they have lowered the price quite drastically to just Y30 (£3.00), quite a bargain!

The basic layout of the city was built between 1406 and 1420 by Emperor Yong Le who it is said, had one million labourers and craftsmen to build the city. The building standing today mostly dates to around 18th century due to the frequent fires that occurred in the city. A lantern festival combined with a sudden gust from the Gobi dessert usually did the trick, so to did the firework displays that the Chinese invented! Sometimes there were deliberate fires that were ignited by the court Eunuchs and officials who would get rich off the repair bills. The moat around the palace actually came in very useful as a source to extinguish the fires, and it is said that some of the Emperors enjoyed the spectacle of the fires, except the Emperor Jiajing who built a hall in honour of the Fire God. Three fires caused by lightning, including the biggest in 1557, broke out during his reign.

A century later in 1664, the Manchus stormed in and burned the palace to the ground. It was not only the buildings that went up in smoke, so did the rare books and paintings, in fact anything that was flammable. On top of all this bad luck, there have been two major lootings of the city this century. The first by the Japanese forces and the second by Kuomintang, who, on the eve of the communist takeover in 1949, removed thousands of crates of treasures to Taiwan where they are now on display in Taipei’s National Palace Museum, which is considered to be one of the top three museums in the world.

The Forbidden City covers seven hundred and twenty thousand square metres with eight hundred building and nine thousand rooms. A full time restoration squad moves around all the time taking about ten years to complete a full renovation, by which time it is back to the start to repeat the process all over again!

Life within the Forbidden City.

During the Ming dynasties, it was recorded that there were nine thousand maids and as many as seventy thousand Eunuchs serving the Emperors. The royal ’chop’ was administered to the Eunuchs at the Eunuch Clinic near to the Forbidden City, by using a swift knife and a special chair with a hole in the seat. The people applying for the position of Court Eunuch were attempting to better their lives sadly, half of them died during the ’operation’.

One of the imperial ’bedtime systems’ was to keep the names of the royal wives, consorts and favourites on jade tablets near the Emperors chambers. There was probably as many as fifty names listed. By turning over a tablet the Emperor made his request for the evening and the Eunuch on duty would rush to the Womens Quarters to find the ’lucky lady’, and return her wrapped in a yellow cloth but naked underneath to ensure she had no concealed weapons. The lady would be piggy-backed across the court yard and dumped at the feet of the Emperor. The Eunuch would then record the date and the time to verify legitimacy of a possible child.

The three of us spent most of the day within the city walls and found it a truly amazing place with history oozing out of every hall and courtyard that we visited. There was a film made in the Forbidden City which was the first and only time the Chinese authorities had allowed the cameras into the city. The film was called "The Last Emperor" and when I returned to England I rented it from the video library and found it to be remarkable, it was even better having recently visited the film ’set’. "The Forbidden City" turned out to be yet another wonderful place that made the trip so memorable.

At 5.00pm we went to Tiananmen Square for the flag lowering ceremony. Amazingly the traffic travelling along the busy road in front of the Forbidden City halts for about half an hour every day to allow the soldiers to march across to lower the flag, and then march back across the road and into the city walls. The soldiers march at precisely one hundred and eight paces per minute, seventy five centimetres per pace. The flag lowering ceremony was watched by numerous people in almost complete silence. Once the flag had been neatly folded and the soldiers marched off into the Forbidden City, a whistle was blown and all the many hundreds if not thousands of cyclists, buses and cars and of course pedestrians just started to pedal, drive and walk, all at the same time. No one moved an inch during the entire ceremony!

It was by now nearly 6.00pm and after walking around the Square a little bit more we got a taxi back to the hotel where, exhausted, I had a quiet night in to see if my cold would get any better. I spent most of the evening reading my Lonely Planet guide to see where I could go tomorrow to make the most of the last day in Beijing.

Read Neils complete adventure here.