Asian Adventures: Dongcheng, History and Spirituality

Dongcheng, History and Spirituality

The gorgeous Temple of Heaven

Too many people! Literally you cannot walk through the historic centre without touching at least fifty people in the space of a minute. We did however see some fantastic places and eat gorgeous food (as usual).

The Black Bamboo Park

Our first stop in Dongcheng was the Temple of Heaven which is a massive park like complex filled with impressive blue and green temples and many flowers and birds enriched with beautiful scenery and symbolism. The park is in an odd mushroom shape as it represents the heavens (the circle/semi circle) meeting the earth (the square) this is repeated as a motif throughout the park as the temples are often circular but on a square base, once again signifying heaven meeting earth.

The Forbidden City

We also ate lots of food and had some delicious dumplings, but the greatest triumph was finding a restaurant where we had tomato and egg rice, and thick spicy beef noodles and a massive plate of dumplings for around six pounds! It was truly gorgeous and China has certainly delivered several nations worth of people and great food.


I could swear this dragon has googly eyes...

We were meant to go to the great wall of China with mum and dad but decided to have a quiet day as I hadn’t slept that night due to the heat (we had some extra days). We did however have a lazy day and find the aforementioned restaurant.

Cloud Altar

On our final day in Dongcheng we were meant to go to the forbidden city, however after arriving at the bottom of Tiananmen Square, squeezing through the crowds and then queueing for forty five minutes where we got touched up by numerous strangers we decided that we would hate all the people and decided to go home. Instead we went to the Haidian area of Beijing and had a wander around a bamboo park which was gorgeous and contained about 1/1000th of the amount of people we had seen previous to this.

Inside the Temple of Heaven
Tomorrow we'll be telling you about our final days in the Chaoyang District of Beijing. 
In the meantime
  • See our up to date updates on Instagram (We'll be in Fiji by now)
  • Read more about our time in Asia
  • Want to see what we did in Europe try here
  • Or check out my published article for Chasing the Donkey here, who knows maybe you'll feel inspired to travel the Beautiful Balkans?
  • Have a look at where we are going next here
Location: Dongcheng, Beijing, China

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