Foto Friday – Forbidden Palace

In 2009 I found myself travelling around China on a whistle-stop tour visiting the countries great cities and landmarks. Somewhere that I had always wanted to visit was The Forbidden City in the former capital of Peking a city now renamed Beijing.

It lived up to all expectations when I finally got there. The Forbidden City was the Chinese imperial palace from the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty. It is located in what is now the middle of Beijing and houses the Palace Museum. For almost 500 years, it served as the home of emperors and their households, as well as the ceremonial and political centre of Chinese government.

The architecture is amazing, the scale mindblowing and its history resonates from every corner ofpalace the complex.

Advertisement

It is not the critic who counts

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt