Beijing 2024 - Forbidden City Main and Entrance

Finally, after queueing for 30minutes, and going through the ticket and security checks, we were headed inside to the Forbidden City! This was the moment I've been waiting for! How big was it going to be inside? This was the place they filmed The Last Emperor! I was beyond excited! Even the alley going in was so huge and long!

Getting closer now! All the people in front of us were already stopping for photo taking! The first sight! 

Ta-dah! The front yard! You had to go thru another red wall before you reached the front of the Forbidden City. But you could already see the building looming behind the red wall. All the people were already busy taking photographs everywhere. This was just the morning crowd! And don't worry, the queue to get in for independent visitors and tour group are different, so you don't have to queue behind large groups of tour people.

Once inside the red wall, we were finally inside the Forbidden City! Everyone was rushing to the main hall, we decided to avoid the crowd and ventured to the side. That is why we could get lovely photos of an almost empty Forbidden City! The ground was huge! And so clean and white. And I wasn't expecting a river to run through it. That caught me by surprise! But it did made a nice landscape for photo taking.

Here is the view from the side with the red wall and the river. You could see a large crowd of people at the distance. That's the middle of the ground, and we were at the far left side of it. Huge, right? And beyond where we stood, we could enter into another section were different halls and courts can be found! I'll show you that in the next post I think. Come back tomorrow to check that out.

We did venture to the middle to looked at some of the notable large figurine, like this lion here. All chinese temples and official places have these. But here, it was just at a larger scale. Maybe even carved from jade. Who knows! 

Wide eye wide of the Forbidden City.

And another one to show how far you had to walk from the red wall to the first great hall. All I can say is, it is best to come here when you are still mobile! the floors aren't smooth either ya! They are carved of stones. And this was just the front of the palace. Expect to walk more as you enter into the palace ground and courtyards and gardens and ..... you get the idea! I want to say I've never walked so much in my life during my travels before, and it was true during this trip as I could clocked almost 36k steps in a day or so. But I recently did the Singapore Rail Corridor walk from Tanjung Pagar to Kranji, and that was a 42k steps walk, around 24km! So that was my record for now. Problem was, to do a pilgrimage, I needed to walk over 30km a day! Ha! That will take some consideration! I am not getting any younger!

The far left corner of the open space, with red walls/doors dividing the main from the side area.

Super giant red doors that lead to the side area. My plan was to visit all the side areas as well as the main area, with some notable halls as a must-visit on my list. I was prepared mentally that I may not be able to visit every single place in this huge palace, but I was sure as hell going to try! It was hard to get tickets, and I was probably going to be here only once in my life! Gonna fully utilise the whole day here! We have enough food and drinks to last us till dinner time! (I hope).

Souvenir shot of husband at the Forbidden City.

One of us too.

And another! Welcome to the Forbidden City Cordy!