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Published: October 2nd 2009
Creepy
These are the beasts that were protections to the emperorsHello everybody!
Today, we were very brave, and managed to get all the way out to the Ming Tombs by ourselves, without any help from anybody, whether we asked or not. Which was actually quite an ordeal. There are tour busses that leave from south of Tiananmen every day at 9:00, but to be honest, there was no way in the world that we were ever going to get there by that time, we weren't even confident of getting out of bed before 10:00, so that was out. Instead, we walked to the end of our road, caught a bus from there out to Changping, and from there caught another bus out to the tombs.
There is a walk, called the sacred walk, that I would have liked to take, but we mistakenly thought that we would do it on the way home instead of the way there, and by the time we finished up, 7kms of walking was not even vaguely appealing, so we caught the bus straight home, but if we had taken the walk we would have seen many amazing things that would have been awesome...but the things we did see were awesome anyway!
Once
again, I'm not going to bore you with the history of the places we went to (Wikipedia is great) - mostly because I forget the history, but maybe a bit of background...Changling was the first temple we went to (Ling means tomb), and it was the first one that was built as part of the Ming Dynasty (where the vases come from :-) - he was a good emperor and was responsible for building the first incarnation of the Forbidden city, and so the tombs very much resemble the Forbidden City in layout and architectural style - although obviously on a much smaller scale. It's really nice in there, there are a lot of trees to relax under, and the buildings are fantastic - and best of all, the toilet there got a 4 star rating - they even have the plaque to prove it. You can wander around the buildings and eventually go into the largest building where they have a gigantic column that represents the life of the Emperor - I think it's the equivalent of a headstone for us. There is quite a bit to the grounds that extends behind that building, to the hill where the
Dingling
From the outside gate emperor was actually buried, but we couldn't get to it - not sure if it was just closed when we were there or if you can never get back there. There's still a bit of excavation work going on in the areas, and some of the tombs aren't open for tourists (yet), so that's a possibility.
It's not a gigantic place, we only spent about an hour there I think, including the little museum that has all the details about the emperor, and from there we went back to catch the bus to the next tombs, with the amusing name of DingLing. We eventually got there after being harrassed by a million guys that wanted to take us there for RMB10 - when the bus only costs RMB0.40 - and there's no likelihood of being kidnapped or taken to a dodgy souvenir (I finally spelled that word right!) shop.
DingLing is much more impressive, much bigger, and as a little bonus, has an underground palace that you can explore. It's really cool, it was built to resemble the above ground one on a miniature scale, so it has the thrones for the emperor and his two empresses, and
Dragon & Phoenix
Both are good luck at the end of the palace they have their coffins - well, cheap, plastic reproductions of the coffins at least - but they're supposed to be pretty accurate. The information on how they actually found the palace is pretty interesting actually, they dug up directions on how to find it on different signposts that they excavated, and so they were able to find it without making too much disturbance, but you can look that up if you're interested!
After that, we made our way back. That was a bit more tricky, because on the way there we just got out when the bus got the the end of its route, but on the way home I had to remember stations, and tried to remember characters too because the PinYin names were too hard, but we got home and all was good. We had some dinner out at Sanlingtun too and I had the BEST creme brulle I've ever had in my entire life at a french restaurant, so I went to bed very happy!
Tomorrow is the national day, so I don't know what's going to happen. I found out yesterday that you can't actually go to it
unless you're a high ranking communist, which I don't think I am, so TV will have to do I think. Or maybe I'll just sleep!
Hope everybody's well! Keep sending us messages and emails, it makes us very happy!!! I've just realised that this website changes the captions I've made for the photos and puts them in a stupid order and leaves some photos out entirely, which is very annoying. I've tried to fix the captions but gave up on the order of the photos - but it's 1:45 in the morning and I'm a fair way past caring now, so if you don't like it, you'd better not say anything!
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Brooklin
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Cool Tree
Hey Ray, Would you mind bringing home one of those cool trees? I think it would look good in the entrance to the showroom. If it's a bit big and too hard to get through customs, maybe you could draw me one and I could stick it on my desk next to your drawing of you 'near' car accident. Hope your having an awesome time, you are both forever making me jealous of my 'chained to the desk' status and will punish you with my own personal countdown when you return.