Location: Beijing, China
Temperature: -4 to 6 degree Celsius
Weather: Sunny and windy
Although it is a freezing day today, we still have a lot of fun enjoying the grand and beautiful architectures and the ancient Chinese history in the Forbidden City as well as the Summer Palace.
The Forbidden City is mostly known as the place where the ancient Chinese emperors lived and worked. It is huge that if you want to walk through all the buildings inside it, it might take you two days! It is also my first time visiting the Forbidden City that I was so excited! Although I learned about some of the histories of its history in my middle school, I could barely remember. So it is a great way to refresh my knowledge of Chinese history as well!
The Forbidden City was enlarging all the time as different emperors want to rebuild their places as well as make it representative for themselves in most cases, they were using many kinds of wood, paints, and human labor to build these gorgeous architectures that we enjoy today. By walking through these buildings as well as looking at some of the patterns and colors they use on the buildings, I could tell that they put a lot of effort into the design. However, they also remind me of an unsustainable way of consuming. As people nowadays are kind of obsessed with the unsustainable consumption by buying a lot of "unnecessary" things, the emperors in ancient Chinese also had the same logic applying to their constructions of their "living rooms" and "offices". They always wanted to have the best materials for the constructions, which need a lot of energy for framing, treating, transportation, and finalizing. Back at that time, they didn't see the boundary of natural resources that mostly contribute to what we have for the unsustainable logic of consumption.
While after lunch, we went to the Summer Palace where was built by the Qianlong emperor for his mother's 60th birthday as for a place for the summertime, while the Summer Palace has plenty of water as well as a mountain inside, that hopefully would give a great feeling of joy to his mother. I could not forget how beautiful and quiet the Kunming Lake was this afternoon. I was surprised by the longest walkway in the world too!! Besides, the paintings on the bricks of the walkway are so unique and surprising to me as they are all different and they all represent stories of ancient China. I could not appreciate more when I looked at those paintings and think of how romantic it will be in the summer.
I believe the beauties of these architectures and the histories have already helped us to forget our tiredness and the freezing temperature of today.
Here are the pictures that I took today:
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