Travel Notes #东城区
China Knowledge
Tiananmen Square: An Eight-Hundred-Metre Central Axis
Eight hundred eighty metres north to south, five hundred east to west, 440,000 square metres, room for a million people. In the Ming and Qing it was a T-shaped street that ordinary subjects could not enter; only after the founding ceremony of 1 October 1949 did it become what it is.
China Knowledge
Yonghe Temple: From a Prince's Mansion to Beijing's Largest Tibetan Buddhist Temple
Yonghe Temple began as the mansion where Yongzheng lived as a prince, and was turned into a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in 1744 by his son Qianlong. Red walls and yellow tiles, seven courtyards, and an eighteen-metre Maitreya carved from a single sandalwood trunk make it one of Beijing's busiest places of worship.