The forbidden city is SO diassapointing! You would think that China would work harder to make this cultural treasure more accessable to tourists. Instead, the English translations on the signs make no sense, the tour guides speak terrible English, most of the buildings are closed up tight, and the ones you can look into have no lights and provide about a 4 foot opening for groups of 40 people to try to look into. Some are being used simply as storage, and all pretty much look the same on the outside. Ho Hum. You have to see it if you're in Beijing, but I recommend watching "The Last Emperor" and then walking straight through it (an hour or less) so you can say you've been there.

This is a big area to view and there are many many big groups of tourists, often wearing matching baseball caps and moving as one, like ants on the march! Because of this it was a bit of a scrum
and the interiors of the buildings would have been better if some more of the furniture remained and we had been able to see it more easily!
The museum was good.

I was driven to Tienamen Square, which was jammed with tourists (90% of them Chinese!), and driven around the periphery. Didn’t stop to get out, but drove back to the north end, to the famous gate above which hangs the giant portrait of Chairman Mao. The line waiting to get in the front gate was obscenely long, so the driver took us around the side, and we got in through the side gate, much quicker. I followed my guide around the city, and saw tour groups rushing up the middle of the city, and learned that “the working principle” dictates that groups of 10 or more must not deviate from the central axis of the city, in order to invoid distractions and delays. A large guided tour sees the city in about 40 minutes. I got to wander all over, and spent about 2 hours, and could have spent 3 more. However, I got a very good oversight of the whole thing, including some lesser known history, and peeks into side palaces and areas off the beaten track. We walked out of the “back door”, and the driver met us there, ready to take us to lunch, another fun-filled solo affair, wherein I sat forlorn at a table eating overboiled veggies and drinking my one permitted glass of water (“one free, 2 yuen for each subsequent”). If it wasn’t for my in-room dinners, at which I always get a dessert, I would be losing weight wonderfully!

At the moment some of the buildings are under wraps inevitably, so I was unable to appreciate two of the most well known buildings of all.

Pollution notwithstanding get close enough to your intended building and it'll be overwehelming.

As part of a fully guided tour package we weren't in a position to dash off and get a guide book. Indeed I had forgotten where this vital point was as we were hustled through those early gtes a lot quicker than our tour were prepared to be hustled. Photoes definitely
on the move. I think our guide was more interested in feeding us info
at this point, though we would have a chance to supplement our efforts with a commercial BeiJing DVD plus a holiday DVD made by one of our Chinese guides.

As there are almost no English signs about and its very difficult to carry in your head everything you've ever read about the City's history, a good guide book will make a memorable visit even better. I've read good and bad about the 'auto guide' facility.

When one is queuing up for tickets one is in the midst of a *huge* crowd. I can't imagine what this would be like later in the year or even later in the day. We were there around 10am.

However, once one gets into the big couryards its easier to forget you're part of a huge sea of people as everyone spreads into their groups as closely as possible so one either doesn't get lost or is listening to one's guide.

We took the 'West-MIddle' way through the City, and I supose we took a couple of hours. It certainly felt more than a very quick visit of about an hour.

Some of the exhibitions you can access inside the side buildings, others can only be accessed by looking through a door.

The palace courtyard (I think where the Dowager Empresses lived) we visited in detail was one that you could only see the inside of the buildings via rather grubby windows.

What we expected to see, I think, was the sort of plushness imagined from watching films such as 'the Last Emperor'. Not a bit of it. Everything was very plain: no silk drapes, nothing at the windows, nothing on the floor. It looked rather 'threadbare', and we did wonder whether at some point in the 20th century it had been looted or things had been moved to safety and never came back. I don't think our guides had that depth of knowledge.

The Imperial Garden is an amazing piece of landscaping. Rocks, buildings, trees, a pond. And it all seemd to be inside such a small piece of ground yet perfectly balanced to the eye.

We walked acorss the moat - but all the image one got was of a misty river: romantic but not one which would give one an idea of the grandeur of the whole vista.

Both at the entrance and the exit, beware the *huge* number of hawkers. At the exit in particular I found myself almsot treading on men who were seated either on skateboard type bases or literally on the ground because they had no legs.

There is a sense of continuous voices trying to sell at these points:
it seemed much more of a problem here than in many of the other places I visited.