Sunrise, sunset
(Crowd waiting in Tiananmen Square: Beijing, China)
In sharp contrast to the Xixi Wetlands Park’s lack of autumn visitors, this is the spring crowd at the daily flag lowering ceremony in Tiananmen Square. It comes down with great aplomb at sunset, and up at dawn each and every day. There must have been well over one hundred soldiers performing the ceremony and maybe over a thousand people watching it.
The crowds were ten or even twenty people deep – as you can see, there were a lot of us. I’m sure that even though it’s peak season in summer, that tourists don’t manage to make it for the sunrise raising of the flag. It must be at 3 or 4am in the height of summer. We didn’t manage 5.25am when we were there, though we seriously considered it, for at least five minutes anyway.
– Today Rosie is in the UK, working on the layout for a book –
