City in a city
(View of the Forbidden City from Jing Shan Park: Beijing, China)
I have been ferreting through my Beijing photographs, trying to source some good ones to show you. I like this one because it was at this moment, as my camera clicked, that I realised what I had spent most of the day traipsing through. The Forbidden City is an unbelievable size, its scale can be appreciated best from here, or perhaps from the sky. I learned that there were originally nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine rooms in the Forbidden City*, one less than the Gods have. The Beijing guides take great pleasure in relating the following fact; if a person slept one night in each room, it would take over twenty-seven years to go through them all. It’s a rather silly notion, but does make a mockery of trying to see the entire Forbidden City in one or two days. Apparently though, only a small percentage is open to the public.
I wish I could have seen what the Palace would have looked like in its heyday. There were many photographs on show depicting the last Emperor and his Empress, plus the ‘dragon lady’, Empress Xici. She enjoyed dressing up as the female Buddha, (Guan Ying) and then being photographed. A bizarre woman indeed. Even though so many images survive, none of them give an impression of the actual palace itself – it must surely have been bursting with people occasionally, or perhaps it was always as desolate and empty as now. If anyone knows, I would love to hear about it. My impressions are based on being there, some light reading on the subject and from watching Disney’s Mulan. Not particularly impressive sources of fact.
In real time, I leave for the UK in less than a week and I am completely unprepared. I have managed to give myself flu with fatigue. I think my body has been weakened by low pressure work at home and no office pressure until I took this manual on. People in the office kept saying things like “if only you knew how close this project is to the wire” or “I know we said Friday, but we really need it today”. That’s why I haven’t taken a day off and have worked for eight straight days – until today. My work is very close to being finished and I’ll perhaps manage to complete it by the end of today. I’m tapping this out in the lounge, sporting a pair of oversized tartan pyjamas and sniveling. I keep glancing at the sunshine outside the window with slight disdain. On the upside, the bitter taste I was experiencing has almost completely gone.
*There are still almost nine thousand.
