Forbidden City, Tiananmen & Wanfujing, Beijing 2009 - Day 2

We woke up at 8am today and had our breakfast in the hotel around 8.30am. Dong Si Fu Yuan breakfast sucks to the max. Nuff said. Our destination for today is Forbidden City, Tiananmen and Wanfujing Street Snack. I planned visiting Tiananmen at night as many forumers said that Tiananmen has a nice night scenery. We then took Beijing subway and reached Tiananmen around 10.30am. What I didn’t know is Tiananmen is actually a huge square that is connected to Forbidden City. I thought they are separated afar by each others. On our way into the Forbidden City, we came across persimmon trees. This is my first time looking at persimmon tree and it bears a lots of persimmon fruits on each of every tree! Ticket for Forbidden City cost CNY60 per person and we managed to get it after 10 minutes queuing. We also rented the automatic tour guide aka electronic map which run on sensor. The red LED shows point of interest (POI) and when you have arrived to that particular POI, the LED light will goes off indicating 'visited' places and automatically begin talking about the history. Deposit CNY100 for each unit and CNY40 for English while CNY10 for Chinese language. The Forbidden City was the Chinese imperial palace from the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty. For almost five centuries, it served as the home of the Emperor and his household, as well as the ceremonial and political centre of Chinese government. The construction of Forbidden City took a total of 14 years involving millions of workers and hundred thousand of artisans. It was the order of Hongwu Emperor in Ming dynasty to start this massive construction during 1406. I am amused and fascinated at the structure of the building in Forbidden City. Just imagine that you are walking in an emperor's palace which is the most powerful man in China during the era of 1400-1500 something. During that time if you are a normal person, dun even think to steps into this powerful palace. If you offended the emperor, be prepare to be beheaded and not only you but your whole family! I was so interested in this Forbidden City history that when I came back to Malaysia, I read the whole summary of this piece of history as I wanted to know why there is no more emperor’s generation anymore in China. I found out that the last emperor was Pu Yi with the history "From emperor to normal citizen" which is quite interesting, Nanking massacre, protest at Tiananmen in 1989 and others. I wonder why I have more interest in knowing a part of China history rather than our own Malaysia history. Well, I wouldn't want to bore you any further with words describing Forbidden City and Tiananmen but I will just let the pictures do the talking instead. We spend a total of 8 hours from 10.30am to 6.30pm in Forbidden City and Tiananmen and we had a wonderful sightseeing here. I enjoyed the sunset in Forbidden City too and we ate biscuit and hot dog as our lunch. The time sure past very fast here. The only cons is our leg is killing us with all the walking we done here. We then took the subway to Wangfujing station for street snack attack for our dinner. I must admit that Donghuamen food is better than Wangfujing. We ate tan tan noodles by the street while watching opera show on the second floor of the building. Then we continue walking down the street eating those snacks we ate at Donghuamen. Then we took subway to Dongsi station and walk back to our hotel. Both of us soak our feet into hot water as our leg is so painful. We called it a day around 11pm. Oh, by the way the temperature in Beijing during day time is somewhere between 15C-18C while at night about 10C-13C. A lot people said that during October is the best time to visit china as it's not so cold and hot. For us Malaysian, it can consider pretty cold. Haha