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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This is the end

Image
Puerto Morelos The wonky old Lighthouse So off we went from Tulum roaring down the road towards out final destination. For this we had chosen Puerto Morelos, a small fishing town (or a small drinking town with a fishing problem as one bar described it). Although there are other more famous places we could have gone to such as Playa del Carmen or Cancun we had decided on Puerto Morelos as it was described as being less busy and resorty but a little more charming. For this reason it was a little bit of a shock when we had been bombarded by people asking us into their shop as soon as we stepped out of the taxi that had run us the few miles from the bus station to the sea front.  Beautiful cups at Lola y Moya Our time here was short and generally meant to be relaxing, as a result there wasn't a breadth of things that we had planned to do apart from walking by the sea front and seeing the wonky old lighthouse. We did however find an amazing cafe place called Lola y Moy
Read more

Dominant Dubrovnik

Image
Dominant Dubrovnik  This is the place is the sight of the Game of thrones series and because of this much of the tourism is based off of the GOT franchise. Walking down the old higgledy-piggledy streets you are bound to bump into a tour or two. Unfortunately for us having never watched GOT it's rather lost on us. Still, we enjoyed wandering around the choice of shops, which seem to be developing in to nice homemade boutiques and products made by local artists rather an upwards step from the novelty touristic shops. Though we did thoroughly enjoy a wonder round the Christmas shop. Oddly still stuffed full of people at this time of year, and yes they were being hand made in the back of the shop. We watched a woman ice and glitter her baubles. The Christmas Shop is on my phone, so here's a picture of Andrew picking a nose... You can get quite lost in the lanes as there are so many of them inside the old town which is a beautiful, red roofed, white stoned walled fortr
Read more

Storm the Fortresses, Our Journey in Montenegro

Image
Montenegro With rising black mountains and deep blue bays Montenegro was a place which was full of stunning views for us. We got on the bus from beautiful Dubrovnik and took the winding coastal road down towards the Montenegrin border. The border was a bit long as we had to all get off the bus for both borders. Upon crossing the border we hit quite a lot of rain and this gave our first glimpse of Montenegro a very sinister and gloomy look. This said it didn't ruin the experience but rather added to it. Kotor While in Kotor we stayed in the old town and this gloomy effect really made it feel like we were immersed in some old medieval town with it's white walls and cobbled streets. Kotor itself is an old Venetian fortress leftover from the Albanian kingdom of the aforementioned empire. To be honest it was all a bit much during the day as many cruise ships offload in Kotor so the whole town is teeming with tourists. During the evening however the town is very relaxed a
Read more