FORBIDDEN CITY 2

Today I'm posting more pics from the Forbidden City. We spent a good part of a whole day there and still we had to skip some parts or some halls were closed by the time we made it to them. I'm not the kind of guy who likes to rush, especially on vacation. No way! That's too much like my regular life, rushing to meet this deadline or that deadline. I like to take my camera, stop, look around, really try and see a place, really look at it, try and absorb as much as I can visually and in the case of FC, spiritually.

I really try and imagine what it was like to live there back in time. This means you have to slow down to take it in, like radiation, let a place bake you with it's physical and spiritual vibration. A place like this has a lot of both, a lot of history...a lot of heavy shit went down here and when I look down at the very bricks on the ground I was walking on I was thinking about how many people had trod upon the same spot. I guess I don't think much about that type of thing here in the states as modern life forces that type of contemplation out of your head much of the time. But here, on the beautiful sunny afternoon, about 2:30-3, a slight summer wind started to pick up in the inner courtyards where we were. As the warm breeze blew the trees and kicked up some dust, when the other tourists were gone I could really imagine being in the 1700's or even earlier, on the same day hundreds of years ago.

This was one of the areas that was closed off to tourists, probably for reconstruction. The goal of the goverment and UNESCO is to protect FC and return it to its original pre 1912 condition.

Detail from on of the roofs. It really strikes you after a while that this whole place is one amazing piece of art, every door, window, brick, planned, designed, carved, sculpted etc.

Look at these amazing old bricks. They were especially made and supposedly ring is struck. How many people have walked here?

One of the few lights I noticed in the entire place, which I image at one point must have been a torch? It was very high up the wall.



Feng Ping was Here.

The last two pics are of grafitti scratched into the wall. Yes, even in the Forbidden City there is grafitti. I guess people just can't resist scratching their names or saying onto a blank wall, no matter where. Perhaps this place being so famous made it even more tempting? There where many,many signs throughout FC stating "No Scratch", that the walls were protected. Seems some can't or couldn't resist leaving their mark. Now some of this might have been done back during the Cultural Revolution when a lot of damage was done to the FC, or even earlier. For a long time the city was possibly even going to be torn down, the army was brought in at one point to protect the sacking of artifacts and the entire city was closed between 1966 and 1971.