Beijing Brilliance!

Welcome to Part 2 of my China blog post ?  As you will know if you read last week’s blog post, we travelled to Beijing after our friend’s wedding in Shanghai.  We had the option to either fly to Beijing, or take the high speed railway.  We opted for the train as it seemed easier than going to the airport and checking in and all that stuff.  However, when we got to Shanghai’s Railway Station it actually felt just like an airport.  It was absolutely HUGE, and there were more people than in any airport that I have ever seen! To be completely honest, I was kind of dreading the journey as it was going to take about five hours to get there by train. However, I must admit that it turned out to be a very pleasant journey.  The train was very spacious and air conditioned, and we had assigned seats so people weren’t charging to get on the train first lol.  One of the things which struck me most about China in fact, is that despite the huge number of people everywhere you go, the chaos is managed incredibly well.  Somehow it just works! It’s very impressive!

We arrived in Beijing around 3pm, and after a crazy one hour taxi journey, we checked into our hotel.  The hotel was in a great location.  It was on Wangfujing Road, which is one of the most famous shopping streets of Beijing.  Most of the area is pedestrianised which made it really pleasant for walking around.  It was also really close to a metro station, which was very handy!  By the way, China’s underground network is very impressive.  We never had to wait long for a train, they were all well air conditioned and never too overcrowded (which I was very surprised by).  It was also ridiculously cheap!

We were incredibly lucky with the weather in Beijing when we were there.  Beijing is well known for its dust and pollution, but while we were there, we had blue skies and there wasn’t a dust mask insight.  There had been a dust storm 3 days before we arrived so we missed it by the skin of our teeth.  By the time we got to Beijing the weather was glorious.  According to our Chinese friends we were very lucky!

We spent the first evening having a little walk up and down Wangfujing Road and just had some dinner and a few drinks.  We were also entertained by little groups of people who were dancing on the street (this seemed to be a thing in Beijing as we seen many different groups doing this on different days lol).

Temple of Heaven

The next day, we headed to the Temple of Heaven.  The Temple of Heaven is a complex of religious buildings where the Emperor would visit twice a year to perform ceremonies, and to pray for good harvests.

The Temple grounds cover an impressive 2.73 km² of parkland, and includes three main developments:

1. The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests
2. The Imperial Vault of Heaven
3. The Circular Mound Altar

The area surrounding the temple grounds consists of an extensive park with absolutely stunning landscape.  The entire complex is 660 acres!! The Temple of Heaven was inscribed as an UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998.  It was described as a ‘masterpiece of architecture and landscape design’ and I completely understand why.

We spent hours strolling around the incredible gardens and fields of wild flowers.  It was absolutely beautiful.  My personal favourite area was the Chinese Rose Garden, which had more colours of roses than I knew existed and has roses that were as tall as myself……. BEAUTIFUL! I absolutely loved this place.

Ming Tombs

The following day was by far the most amazing day we had in Beijing, as we were visiting The Great Wall of China! This was something which has always been on my bucket list, and I couldn’t believe that I was finally doing it!

Our friend organised for a tour guide to bring us out for the day which was such a great idea.  A little mini bus picked us up early in the morning and we didn’t have to worry about a thing after that.

Interesting fact – our tour included a visit to the Ming Tombs en route to the Great Wall.  These were about an hour away from our hotel.  On the way to the tombs, and after many renditions of Katie Melua’s ‘9 million bicycles in Beijing’, our tour guide informed us (to our disappointment) that cars are increasing in the city at a rapid rate, with far fewer people relying on bicycles to get around.  This of course is not helping the pollution situation in Beijing.  Our guide informed us that there were only 2,300 cars in the entire city in 1949, and it took Beijing nearly 50 years to reach a million cars in 1997.  Today, however, car sales in Beijing have overtaken those in the US! Our guide also informed us that the government is investing a lot of money into planting forests across Beijing to help combat the pollution.  This also explains why the cities have impressive planting and greenery everywhere, which came as a pleasant surprise to me.

Back to the Ming Tombs …….. We arrived at the Ming Tombs in about an hour.  The collection of tombs were built by the Emperors of the Ming dynasty in China as their chosen location for burial.  The location of the tombs was chosen based on the principles of Feng Shui and this 40 square kilometre valley, which is surrounded by mountains and tranquil waters, was considered the perfect location.

A 7km road named ‘Spirits Way’ leads into the area of the tombs, and towards the end it is lined with statues of the animals and soldiers who guard them.  There was a standing and sitting version of each statue.  Our tour guide informed us that the standing statues represent the guardians who were on watch, and the sitting statues represent the guardians who were resting, signifying a 24-hour watch.

I completely understand why the emperors chose this as their final resting place! It was so so peaceful here, and had such a relaxing feel.

The Ming Tombs were also listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003.

Great Wall of China

We left the Ming Tombs and got back on the bus, with it taking another hour before we reached the Great Wall.  Given that the wall was built in different sections (a number of smaller walls which were joined up to become the Great Wall) stretching for thousands of miles, different parts of it have been better preserved than others.  We visited the Mutianyu Great Wall.  This is one of the better preserved sections of the wall, and one of the most popular for tourists.  This section has a total length of 3.4 miles, and there are a total of 23 watch towers distributed along the wall.

When we arrived at the wall, I was surprised by how orgnaised and modern the entrance was.  I was expecting it to be extremely busy, but we just had to wait for a few minutes for our tour guide to collect the tickets before heading straight in!

We took the cableway up to number 14 watch tower.  This in itself was an experience!! It was just brilliant! Once we reached tower 14 we had the option to hike northward or southward.  We opted to go north towards watch tower 23.  The views along the route were absolutely incredible!! It blew my mind seeing what they manged to build all those years ago, without any of the engineering knowledge and equipment we have today.  It’s completely astonishing!

We walked up and down what must have been thousands of steps.  The beauty of the wall is that so many different styles and techniques of building were used.  In some areas, there were steps that must have been almost a metre tall, and in other areas there were tiny baby steps!  The terrain is completely exhausting as it is up and down, and up and down the whole way.  As much as we were enjoying the trek and pushing ourselves to go further and further along towards the last watch tower, we couldn’t even take comfort in thinking that the way back would be easier, as it is exactly the same terrain on the way back (up and down, up and down).  One of our friends (by some miracle) made it to the very last watch tower, which was very impressive.  The rest of us didn’t! I don’t think we would have made it there even if we had another full day to climb! Lol.  After lots of hiking and thousands of pictures (and a very expensive ice lolly lol) we made our way back to the meeting point and then the best bit happened…….

We got a toboggan all the way to the bottom of the wall!! This was AMAZING!! Lol it was so so much fun! We were just spinning through the mountains for about 10 minutes, admiring the scenery (and some wildlife) until we reached the bottom.  You can watch a little video clip of it here.  This was such an incredible day, an opportunity of a lifetime and an experience that I will never ever forget! Lots of great memories were made.

Tiananmen Square

The day after visiting the Great Wall, we thought we would head towards Tiananmen Square.  The square is well known for a tragic incident which took place there in 1989.  Student demonstrators were killed for publicly mourning the death of Hu Yaobang (an ousted General Secretary of the Communist Party, who became a symbol of reform for the student movement).

On the day that we visited the square, however, they were hosting the ‘one belt, one road’ summit, so we could not get very close to the square.  We just snapped a few pictures from across the road.

The Forbidden City  

After visiting Tiananmen Square, we headed into the Forbidden City.  The Forbidden City was the Chinese Imperial Palace between 1420 and 1912.  In this time, it served as the home of the Emperors and their households, and was the ceremonial and political centre of Chinese government.  The city consists of a total of 980 buildings and covers an area of 180 acres.  It was absolutely huge! The buildings just went on and on and on.  Every time I thought we were coming to the end, we would go through another set of doors to a new, bigger and more impressive courtyard.  The buildings are a symbol of Chinese architecture and we could identify some designs and patterns that we had seen in other parts of Beijing.  As with most of the sites we saw in Beijing, the Forbidden City was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.  It is listed as the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures in the world.

As you can see from my pictures, the Forbidden City is protected by a wall which is 7.9m high x 6m deep x 52m wide (moat).  This was another very impressive site within Beijing.

Hot Pot

As this was our last night in China, we thought it was only right to end it by going for a Chinese hot pot for dinner.  Chinese hot pot consists of everyone sitting around a table which has a huge pot of boiling broth in the middle.  The stainless steel dish is placed on a gas ring in the middle of the table, simmering away throughout the course of the meal.  As the broth is boiling, you use chop sticks to place your raw meat and vegetables into the pot until it cooks…….. yes you cook the food yourself at the table! lol  The choice of food available to cook included thinly sliced meat and lots of different types of vegetables.  The pot is split up into two compartments.  One side has very, very spicy broth and the other has a milder version.  The restaurant even supplies aprons to wear during the meal lol.  As crazy as this sounds, the food was delicious, and it made for a very eventful evening.  Our chopstick skills have also vastly improved as a result lol.

That marked the end of our time in Beijing.  Beijing was very different to Shanghai.  It was more like the China that I was expecting whilst Shanghai was more of a metropolitan city.   I think that overall I might prefer Shanghai (if I had to choose between them to live in), but I would say that there is a lot more to do and see in Beijing, and it is far more authentic.  It is such an interesting city and I feel it is a true representation of China.  I thoroughly enjoyed it and I cannot recommend a visit to it highly enough.

Has anyone got plans to visit it in the future? Or have you been before? I’d love to hear your thoughts too ?