Beijing is just the best city. It blends a striking beauty, both past and present, with a hard driving push toward a promising future.
Here are 5 reasons you really should go now before Beijing changes forever!
1. Its a city with beauty so ancient and so stunning that during my visit in 2001, I stood on the Great Wall and cried with the sheer unnerving power of it. Now, with technological possibilities at their disposal, the Chinese blend old and new and give us exotics like “The Nest:” imaginative, awe-inspiring and just plain over-the-top, drop dead gorgeous.
2. The Summer Palace, or Yihe yuan (Gardens of Nurtured Harmony). The compound is located NW of Beijing and is actually a series of grand palaces with a large hill and a lake. Built in the Jin Dynasty, 1115AD, it was improved upon until the present day: “The Marble Boat”, a 118 foot long pavilion that connects to the “Cloud-Dispelling Hall” (Where Empress Cixi celebrated her birthdays) via an eight hundred foot walkway called “The Long Corridor”. The walkway was provided to the Qianlong Emperor’s Mom so she could easily access the grounds:14,000 paintings deck the halls.
3. Beijing is a city in transition: around the foundations of new building projects, destitution; in the beautiful Tiananmen Square, ghosts. Go while you can still see the parts that will soon be gone forever. You can easily go to Beijing using the cheap Beijing flights.
4. The Great Wall. 4000 miles of stone and earthen fortifications in northern China, was built and maintained between the 5th century BC and the 16th century. It protected the northern borders of the Empire from Xiongnu (a confederation of nomadic tribes from Central Asia) attacks. At its peak, the Wall was guarded by more than one million men.
5. The Forbidden City:(C:1406) was the Chinese imperial palace from the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty and has 980 buildings with 8707 rooms. It’s in the middle of Beijing and now houses the Palace Museum. For almost five centuries it served as the home of 24 Emperors, as well as the centre of Chinese government.
One day, I left downtown Beijing, traveled twenty minutes via bus and then began the climb up “The Great Wall”; It spread before me, undulating for countless miles (because the devil can only go in a straight line, the builders curved the walls). My friends continued climbing (and made it a long way!) but I stopped and turned to look over the countryside. A canopy of trees stretched as far as the horizon.
The old world, so present in Beijing, is being crowded by the new. Where only twenty minutes before there were the crowds and cacophony of Beijing, now, I was totally alone in a quiet, ancient world.
Go to Beijing. Now.
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Tags: century, foot, qianlong emperor, yihe yuan
