Tiananmen

The name Tiananmen, or Gate of Heavenly Peace, comes from the gate to the North which separates the city square at the centre of Beijing from the Forbidden City. It's the place where Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China, in 1949 and his portrait still hangs above the gate in the wall of the Imperial City. It's where the infamous Tiananmen Square massacre happened in 1989 - a few years after I last visited. And there is still tremendous sensitivity about the student protests and military crackdown. Tiananmen is simply huge. Apparently the biggest civic square in the world and with the biggest museum in the world on the East flank.

As in many of the tourist centres, there are arrangements of a scale to manage football crowds, with barriers and gates and lots of police checks. On one of the lamp-post extensions, I counted 27 different cameras, potentially checking what was going on.

The National Museum was overwhelming in scope and the signposting didn't help us much with prioritising what we were going to see. Ancient sculptures next to Lunar exploration, with corruption next door and a terrific exhibition of Greek Treasures near that!

The displays were fabulous, though. Rare and remarkable objects, well lit, with explanations in English and QR codes for a deeper dive on anything.

There was a fabulous model of the waterwheels we had seen working in the fields in the Dong villages - and spillikin-based drinking game .....

It was good to see a celebration of Zheng He - a muslim eunuch who was a diplomat and an admiral from the early Ming dynasty. He's the one behind seven famous treasure voyages across Asia in huge ships many times bigger than anything Europeans ever used to cross the Atlantic! These few photos are for my sailing friends! Zheng He's bell and a model of his ship .....

It was really interesting to see the sophistication of the Greek treasures, from "the Countless Aspects of Beauty" collection. Often much earlier than the Chinese exhibits but of exquisite quality.

Although things look close on a map - the blocks in Beijing are huge and so it can take you 40 mins to walk just a couple of blocks 😊. But there are bikes to rent, taxis, buses and a brilliant tube system. Even so, we walked 15 km today and so it felt auspicious that we had a huge hailstorm at the end of the day which gave us an honourable reason for staying home that evening, to shelter from the marble-sized ice balls!