2002-12-04 - 5:05 p.m.

The Forbidden City

Beijing, Nov. 15

Continuing the story of our trip to China

We were scheduled to meet our guide at 8:20 in the morning which ordinarily would be inhumanly early in my book, but I was still jetlagged, so I was often finding myself awake at 5 or 6 a.m. so 8:20 was no big problem. We wandered downstairs and indulged in the hotel's big western-style breakfast buffet, then made our way to the lobby.

Our guide while we were in Beijing was a soft spoken woman Chinese woman named Vivian, and Lily took an immediate liking to her. She was one of the few Chinese people who seemed to be able to figure out that Lily is half Chinese herself. At several times during the day the two of them had their heads together, chatting about something or other in Chinese.

Since it was so early I figured that I should wear my winter jacket, and this turned out to be a smart move. The mild weather of the previous day had been something of a fluke, and today it was much more wintery.

We were joined on our tour bus by two other couples, all older than us (meaning: older than me). One couple was from Australia, the other was from New Zealand.

The Forbidden City was one of the main things that I wanted to see in China, and with absolutely no foreplay, that's exactly where we went first. Because we had to pick up one of the other couples at a hotel some distance away it seemed like the Forbidden City was far away, but in fact its eastern wall was only two blocks from our hotel.

Even though this didn't occur to me until much later, I didn't feel like I was visiting a historical site, it felt much more like I was visiting the set of a movie, specifically the 1987 movie The Last Emperor.

As a sidebar, one of the tiny problems I had with that otherwise great movie was that it really didn't give a good feel for what it must have really been like, living in the Forbidden City. I think the main reason for that is that they couldn't really populate the city like it was in those times - there were thousands of eunuchs living on the grounds. Also, all of the buildings I looked at seemed rather drafty. How on earth did they heat them in the winter? It seemed pretty darn cold, and it was only mid-November.

Because our time there was limited, we really didn't have time to wander around and explore and see the actual living quarters. Mores the pity. However, we did look at many of the major buildings and temples. The Forbidden City was originally built in the 1400s, at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, but due to various fires and disasters probably few of the actual buildings date from that time. Most are probably mid-1700s vintage. The last major round of looting and pillaging took place in 1949 when the Nationalists sacked the place just prior to escaping to Taiwan.

The Forbidden City is huge, and it's sitting on prime real estate, right in the middle of Beijing. I was impressed with the extravagance of the Chinese emperors, but there was much more to come.

It was here that we got our first look at what was fated to become one of the obsessions of our trip to China - doo-schlockies!

The Chinese emperors were a very superstitious lot, and very into numerology. Odd numbers were supposed to be lucky, and the number nine, being the highest single-digit number was reserved for the emperor. The number nine pops up a LOT what you look at imperial stuff - for example there are rows of nine knobs on each side of all the doors in the Forbidden city.

Anyway, on all of the buildings of the Forbidden City, on each corner of the roof, there were a row of nine stone figures, the little guardians of the buildings. We never got to see them up close, but they seemed to be little mythical creatures, like phoenixes. The more important the building, the more doo-schlockies it had on it, up to nine. Seven was a pretty important building, five fairly important and three only so-so. NO doo-schlockies at all probably means it is a modern building gussied up to look like an ancient one.

Here's a pretty good picture featuring Forbidden City doo-schlockies. However, the text with the picture isn't quite right, they aren't "dragons" and there aren't twelve of them - the big ones at either end don't count. However, there definitely seem to be more than 9 on the buildings in the distance.

Here's an even better picture of them. See? NOT dragons! Hmph.

Yeah, "doo-schlockies" is kind of a lame name, but we don't know what they're really called. Every time we saw a building with a classical Chinese roof we always tried to count the number of doo-schlockies on it. You'd get conversations like the following:

Uber: Hey look on the roof of that Pagoda! Doo-schlockies!
Lily: Where? Oh, there's only three. Big deal.

Yes, we are dorks.

Here we also ran into a consistent problem with Chinese historical sites: poor lighting. In all of the temples, the doors were open, but bars and ropes kept people from going inside. There was no interior lighting and the fact it was an overcast day meant we could barely see anything inside most of these structures. We tried to take some pictures with our crappy disposable camera, but I realized that if I wanted to get a good look at the lovely interiors I'd have to do it via the pictures in a book. Oh, well.

Continued...