Beijing

@GreatRailJourneys

First day proper of our Tour and we hit the ground rolling with a visit to Tian’ anmen Square which is the largest public square in the world. It’s about the size of Belgium. The weather was what I choose to cal “variable”. The combined attractions of the square and the Chairman Mao mausoleum ensure that the site is a sort of Mecca for the Chinese people and daily they turn up in their tens of thousands. Many of them have never seen Westerners before (except on TV) and so we are a source of some fascination; more photos are taken of us than we take of them!

From the square we walked to the nearby Forbidden City, another huge and busy complex. I’ll let the pictures do the talking…

Perfect time for lunch (we’ve earned it by then) followed by a visit to a Tea House for a demonstration of how to make Cha properly (turns out we’ve been doing it wrong all these years).

To finish the day we stopped at the beautiful Summer Palace where we spotted these delightful kids tucking into their cake and cookies with impressive levels of concentration.