Enid's Trips: Wednesday, September 28, 2011: Part III: Tiananmen Square: the Changing of the Guard, and dinner

After leaving the exhibition, we went to Tian'anmen Square.

Xinhua Men, Gate of New China, adjacent to the Forbidden City which serves as the central headquarters for the Communist government. This is just west of Forbidden City.

Parking by the opera house, which is south of the government headquarters and west of Tian'anmen Square, we walked past it to get to the square.

I find it interested how detailed the forbidden list. Seems like a few of these could have been combined.

Mao's Mausoleum is south of the square. We went through it the following day.

One of the two statues in front of the mausoleum. They reminded me of the revolutionary statues we saw in Russia. This is of triumphant soldiers bringing Mao's banner in triumph. The other side showed ordinary people exulting in Mao's triumph.

Tian'anmen Square was being decorated for the important national holiday of October 1, when in 1949 Mao officially declared China Communist. Andrew told us stories of how his family used to walk or bike to the square to celebrate the holiday.

This huge screen is also being set up for the National Holiday.

Another holiday decoration.

We watched the lowering of the flag which took place at the north end of the square.

The contingent coming to help lower the flag came out of the Forbidden City. All traffic on the major road between the two was stopped while the soldiers crossed.

Everything was lit up at night, and it was very beautiful.

The entrance to the Forbidden City

We walked south of Tian'anmen Square to the shopping center where we had met Danbei on the first evening. This is the Zhengyang gate which leads to the Jianlou shopping center.

The bronze statues outside the stores showed what kind of merchandise was in the store. This is a shoe store. The one gentleman is welcoming visitors while the other is making shoes.

This is outside an alley that led to a lot of smaller shops, not as elaborate as the outside individual shops.

We stopped by a famous hot pot restaurant which looked really interesting but only got skewers of meat here which we ate while we walked around. Then we walked to the Duyichu Restaurant, famed for its dumplings.

The sign outside the restaurant read: "Duyichu is a historic restaurent opened in 1738 AD under the reign of Emperor Qianlong of the Qing dynasty. It has been 270 years old for its high-quality cuisine and the shaomai has been famed for hundreds of years. A 'Shaomai' is a steamed dumpling with the dough gathered at the top. It looks like the wheat-flowers and had thin coat, rich stuffing, and tasted delicious.The duyichu shaomai has to abtioned the highest award of Chinese restaurant "jindingjiang" and and "Chinese top snacks."From 1998 years to date, duyichu has been developed more than 30 different tastes to sample. We will be developing more than 100 different tastes to sample for the customers in 2009."