My second tour may not have been the most enjoyable, but it was certainly the most interesting. Our tour guide was an opinionative man who spoke excellent English from top china trip. He was a forceful advocate of Chinese medicine, an avid palm reader, and a passionate historian.
Our tour group's first destination was the Forbidden City, a city-palace for China's past emperors. The Forbidden City earned its name: in order to maintain the secrets of the royal family, no-one was allowed to enter or leave the city without permission. The city currently has 980 buildings, but tour groups only visit the important, ceremonial structures, which are located along the north-south line. The city's architecture is amazing and its grounds are breathtakingly enormous.
After walking for two hours in the blazing heat, our tour group went indoors to visit a silk shop. We then went back outside to see the famous Temple of Heaven. The Temple of Heaven is an ancient Taoist complex for worship, which was used by the emperor in his quarterly prayer ceremonies. In these ceremonies, the emperor prayed on the behalf of his people for a bountiful harvest. The emperor was thought to rule by heaven's decree, so his prayers presumably received greater consideration than those of his subjects. He prayed in the sensibly named Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests; this marvel of construction is 36 metres tall and has three levels, but it lacks horizontal beams and is made entirely from wood. It is something special.
Our last stop of the day was at the Summer Palace. The Summer Palace started out as an imperial garden, but was dramatically expanded, at great expense, by Empress Dowager Cixi in the late 1800s. The creation of Kungming Lake was one part of this expansion. The man-made lake is 2.2 square kilometres in size and it is apparently 1.5 metres deep because the empress had been concerned that her grandmother might drown. Our tour guide pejoratively referred to the empress as the “dragon lady” and portrayed her as a terrible villainess in Chinese history.
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