I am in Chengdu for Worldcon, but had a couple of days in Beijing first – mostly for a couple of work meetings, but I took time on Sunday afternoon to go and see the Forbidden City, the old imperial palace complex at the heart of the capital.

(By the way, if you have been trying to contact me, I may not have seen your message or may not be able to respond. Google, Facebook, X, Mastodon, WhatsApp, Signal, and a bunch of others are blocked here. There are odd exceptions – Bluesky, my work email, and even this blog, perhaps because it is privately hosted. I can post to Twitter and Mastodon – and this blogpost will automatically go on both – but can’t easily read replies and cannot respond at all.)

Getting to the Forbidden City from my hotel was already an adventure. The hotel advised that it would take ages to get a taxi, so I braved the subway system. Bad news: the ticket machines literally do not work for foreigners, because you have to scan your identity card to get one. Good news: the human ticket desk is always staffed and it only costs 3 yuan (and it’s about 7 yuan to the euro). Also good news: the station names are given in English as well as Chinese. I did not fancy my chances at picking out 天安门西 from a sea of unfamiliar characters. Though it was only six stops on a direct line, which is within my arithmetical skills.

Even the process of getting in is somewhat ceremonial. You need to book a ticket at least a day in advance (but you only have to specify the day of your visit, not the exact time); everyone’s ID cards were checked as we got out at the Tiananmen West metro station; they were checked again at the outer periphery of Tiananmen square; and at the inner entrance to the square there is a full scan of your belongings and a friendly patdown. Tiananmen Square itself is an impressive and evocative public space, but that’s rather difficult to photograph.

On the north wall of the square, which is the south wall of the Forbidden City, the Great Leader observes us all. Lots of tourists were posing for photos with him in the background, some of them saluting, either military-style or with a clenched fist. I asked a friend later if they were being ironic, but she thought it was perfectly serious.

Two more patdowns on the way into the palace complex, and I got stuck behind a group of Austrian students arguing (unsuccessfully) that they were entitled to a discount due to being on an official exchange, and it is a very long walk from the subway, but once I got in, I must say it is just as spectacular as I had expected. The Last Emperor was one of my lockdown Oscar watches, so I felt a shock of recognition. It is an amazing huge architectural / ceremonial / religious / governmental complex. I took photos of all the buildings, but no image can quite convey the experience of being there.

I tried a couple of selfies but was alarmed at just how out of place the bearded white guy looks. Also my selfie game still needs improvement.

Most of my fellow tourists appeared to be Chinese. A number of them were women dressed in traditional costume. I wondered if some or all of them were museum staff, though some seemed younger than you would expect a full-time employee to be. But two local friends in two separate conversations told me that it’s a newish trend to dress up in historically accurate clothes and go and pose at the Forbidden City on a Sunday afternoon – and then they both confidently identified which era each of the dresses belonged to. Cosplay on a broad scale, I guess. The cellphones may not be 100% historically accurate.

And at the back of the Palace, a little girl was playing hide-and-seek with her slightly bigger sister, and winning.

I regret that I came rather late in the day. Jetlag made it difficult to leave my hotel as promptly as would have been ideal, and the Forbidden Palace closes firmly at 5.30; and there was not enough time to look around the inside of any of the art exhibitions. But having read Puyi’s autobiography, and seen the film, and also read a fair bit about his fearsome grandmother Ci Xi, it was interesting to see the places where they had lived.

Having been kicked out, I walked over to the foreign language bookstore on Wangfujing Street. It is a rather lacklustre affair, with a rather old-fashioned assortment of books and not much effort put into presenting them. But it gave me a chance to experience the prevalence of (mostly Western) big consumer brands in China. By now my feet were killing me and I retreated back to my hotel, which incidentally is right beside the spectacular headquarters of CCTV.

I have made maybe half a dozen guest appearances on CCTV’s show “World Insight with Tian Wei” over the years. This was to have a surprising resonance once I got to Chengdu; but we’ll get to that anther day.