The Real Housewives of the Forbidden City

But before we get to the gossip, how about a little more China?

We started off our first day at Tiananmen Square and the entrance to the Forbidden City.  What you’re seeing is “fog.”  That’s right, China calls it fog.  But it’s definitely SMOG.  We’re still trying to figure out the cigarette equivalent to what we were breathing in!  Glad we were just there a few days and the smog was only bad for a day or 2.

UPDATE: Turns out there is a twitter account for Beijing air quality @beijingair.  The day we were in Tiananmen square the air quality was both “Beyond Index” (off the charts) and “hazardous.”

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were some MASSIVE screens in Tiananmen Square.  We wondered if they ever show the super bowl on these screens (doubt it).

The buildings had some pretty crazy detailing.  We were lucky, these had been repainted for the 2008 olympics!

The Forbidden City is HUGE!  And at one time, was home to over 3000 concubines.  You heard me right.  And guess what?  The emperor didn’t want to share these ladies with ANYONE, so the only “men” allowed in the city were called eunuch (pronounced “unix”).  A eunuch is a castrated male, castrated at an early enough age to cause some hormonal problems….if you get my drift.  Either way.  The emperor wanted to make sure the only real man was him!

He (the emperor) put his lady friends up in some pretty nice digs.  Here is the entrance to the concubine village (I made up that name, but it was the area of the city where the 3000 ladies lived…so a concubine village is really all it could be called).

Turns out, concubines love being concubines.  If you get knocked up with a boy, you become the empress.  Easy peasy!  BUT, many concubines live their entire life without ever seeing the emperor.  He has 3000 ladies on standby and can’t even get to all of them.  A shame!

Here is a picture of some of the living quarters.  Not too shabby.

Let’s say you were “lucky” enough to get to “hang” with the emperor.  Well, you’d get taken to this courtyard (there may be more than one….but we only saw this one) and have to strip down to your birthday suit and wait.  Why naked?  The emperor had no trust (rightly so).  One of his concubines tried to kill him using a strap from her robe.  If he bans clothes, that eliminates potential weapons or places for weapons to hide.

Here’s the courtyard.

1 crazy concubine decided to beat the system.  She figured out how to get multiple appearances with the emperor and eventually produce a son.  The emperor died an untimely death (apparently due to his love for prostitutes…..3000 concubines just wasn’t enough).  He picked up an STD (syphilis, according to one couple in the tour group.  I actually don’t think they knew, but that was the first STD that came to their mind).  Once the emperor died, the empress, named dragon lady, became quite the diva.  She ruled China through her little son and killed off one of the other empresses!  So much drama, even in China.  She ended up ruling for like 50 years or something crazy.

If only reality TV were a thing back then.  Imagine the drama!