Tiananmen Square – Beijing China

Few places in the world have the name recognition that the infamous Tiananmen Square has. Whether or not a person knows the history of this amazing square almost everybody recognizes the name. Because of this I have always wanted to visit this amazing place and luckily we got the chance during our 2010 trip to China. We arrived in Beijing via a long and exhausting flight from Moscow Russia. Thanks to hours of studying google earth and maps of Beijing I was able to get us from the Airport to our guesthouse (deep in the Hutongs of Beijing) in only minutes. When we checked into our room we decided to take a quick power nap before hitting the streets. 4 hours later we woke up and couldn’t believe how hard we had crashed. :) By the time we started exploring Beijing that day it was late afternoon. We only had one destination that night and it was Tiananmen Square. We new the general direction so we just started walking the streets to get a feel for the city. Within only a few minutes we hit a corner of the amazing forbidden city. By this time it was early evening and the pink sky was the perfect backdrop against the red structures of the Forbidden City. We continued along the wall surrounding the Forbidden City as we knew this would eventually take us to Tiananmen Square. However, we actually took a wrong turn and ended up smack in the middle of the forbidden city and had to take quite the detour to make it to Tiananmen Square. By the time we made it their it was getting dark but there were still thousands of people hanging out. It is difficult to describe how it feels to be standing in this iconic square. First thing that impressed us was its sheer size. It is a HUGE expansive square with very few places to sit and people watch. Because of this we found ourselves wandering around quite a bit. The first structure we came upon was the famous Gate of Heavenly Peace which is very recognizable. This large structure is built in classic Chinese architecture and is the entry point to the forbidden city from Tiananmen Square. There is a large painting of Mao sitting right in the middle of the gate. After admiring this we made our way further into the square and noticed two gigantic screens that had been set up right in the middle of the square. These screens were promoting Chinese tourism and flashed beautiful pictures of China. We had plans to continue exploring but all of the sudden the police starting rounding everybody up and pushing them out of the square. It turns out that June 4th (the day we were there) was the anniversary of the famous student revolt that took place in Tiananmen Square (think of the famous picture of the man standing in front of the tank). The government feared another revolt on this anniversary so pushed everybody out of the square for the evening. We headed back to our guesthouse but first thing in the morning we were back at the square ready to start our exploring. This time we entered from the other side right at the large and impressive Zhengyangmen gate (a large structure built in classic Chinese architecture). It was early morning and the summer haze/dust of Beijing was just starting to form. We spent another hour just cruising around the square taking pictures of the numerous landmarks within it including the Monument to the Peoples Heroes which is a large pyramid structure built entirely of stone. As the morning drew on the thousands of Chinese tourists started to show up. These groups are very large and are instantly recognizable because they all wear brightly colored hats or carry colored umbrellas so that they can all stay together. Exploring Tiananmen Square in Beijing was a wonderful experience. There is nothing like setting foot on ground that has had so many historic events take place on it.