09:00 Hotel Pick-up
Meet your English-speaking guide at hotel lobby, and then transfer to Forbidden city
09:30 Tiananmen Square
Tiananmen Square is located at the center of Beijing City is, where you can visit Tiananmen Tower, Monument to the People's Heroes, Great Hall of the People, Mao Zedong Memorial Hall and see the national flag raising ceremony. Thousands of people come to the Square every day. It is the must place to visit in Beijing City. |
10:00 visit the Forbidden city
For 500 years the walls of the Forbidden City drew an impenetrable line between the imperial household and the general population. Exceptionally well preserved, the palace was first opened to the public in 1949, allowing visitors to step into a world of emperors, eunuchs, ceremony and splendor.
The palace was originally established by Emperor Yongle (via a million laborers) between 1406 and 1420. In order to show his power and wealth and yet ‘humbly’ accept his natural inferiority to the gods, the palace has a mere 9999.5 rooms, half a room less than the Jade Emperor’s heavenly palace. With 800 buildings covering 720,000 sp m, the palace is so large that a full-time restoration squad is continuously repainting and repairing. It’s estimated to take 10 years to do a full renovation. 24 emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties lived and ruled from the Forbidden City. |
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12:30 have Chinese lunch near the site
14:00 tour Hutong by Rickshaw (1.5-2 hours)
Squeezed between wide boulevards, high-rises and shopping centers lies the labyrinth of Beijing’s vibrant hutong (alleyways). Each one is home to a mini-community with an ancient and often colorful past. The word Hutong was likely brought to Beijing from Mongolia, where it refers to water wells and, by extension, the small villages surrounding them. Chinese characters for the word Hutong weren’t adopted until the 1930s, when the western practice of posting street names began. |
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Hutongs are traditionally lined with siheyuan(four-sided courtyard homes). Originally, the height of the siheyuan walls, the size of the door and the shape of the door stones all told of the type of merchant, or family that lived inside.
Families rooted here for countless generations are being packed up and moved to apartment compounds far from centre. Despite this woeful situation, there are still some hutongs for you to wander around; in fact, if anything to save Hutongs from oblivion, it’s the keen interest tourists have taken in them. |
17:00 back to hotel
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Beijing Summer Palace & Great Wall 1 day
| 08:30 Hotel Pick-up
Meet your English-speaking guide at hotel lobby, and then transfer to Summer Palace on the north-west of Beijing. |
| Despite its name, the Summer Palace is not a palace in the sense of the Forbidden City but an imperial park criss-crossed by pathways and nestled against lovely Kunming Lake. The Qing court spent much of the year here in the empire's final decades. Located about an hour's drive northwest of the Forbidden City (depending on traffic), the Summer Palace rests on the very site where Emperor Qian Long constructed a beautifully landscaped garden in the mid-18th century. In 1860, the garden and the imperial buildings were destroyed by the joint Anglo-French expeditionary forces. Eighteen years later, the notorious Empress Dowager Ci Xi diverted funds from the Chinese navy to restore the buildings and to add many new marvels of her own-most notably the colossal Marble Boat. Many Chinese equate the building of this white elephant to the sinking of the Qing Empire. |
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12:00/12:30 Chinese lunch on the way to Great Wall
13:30 Visit Badaling Great Wall,
The Great Wall is one of the most renowned projects of the world. Construction of the wall began around the 7th-4th century BC during the Spring and Autumn Period. At that time, feudal states built walls for self-defense against nomadic tribes. |
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The easiest place to experience the Great Wall is at Badaling. This section of the wall was last restored in 1957. At an elevation of 1000m, it affords some magnificent views of the masonry snaking its way through the mountains and gives you an inkling of the wall ’s enormity. The restored section crawls for about 1km each say; head left up the stirs (south) for the vaguely quieter route. It’s worth hiking all the way to the end to see the rather forlorn ruins that carry on over the hill. Good footwear is a must. |
16:00 Visit Shahe Cloisonné Plant-On the way back home
Duration: 30-40 min.
Cloisonne, with a history dating back over 500 years, is well-known traditional enamelware. It is typically called the "Blue of Jingtai" as blue is the dominant color adopted for enameling and Cloisonne became prevalent during the reign of Jingtai (1450--1456) in the Ming Dynasty. Owing to its brilliant colors and splendid designs, Cloisonne has been highly appraised both in China and abroad. The making of Cloisonne involves quite elaborate and complicated processes: base-hammering, soldering, enamel-filling, enamel firing, polishing and gilding |
17:30-18:00 back to hotel
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