Beijing, China

November 16, 2025

We flew into Shanghai from Vietnam on Saturday, and we met up with my Dad for dinner before an early trip up to Beijing Sunday morning. We flew up to Beijing on Sunday for a full day tour of the Forbidden City （故宫）and the Great Wall （长城）. Such a wonderful experience visiting China after taking Chinese language and history classes!

Arrived in China!

Nice to have a break from hostel hopping 🙂

Area popular among expats for dinner in Shanghai:

Off to Beijing!

Our tour guide picked us up from the Beijing airport and she gave us a bit of a history lesson as we headed to the Forbidden City area. I got to practice my Chinese a bit, too!

The Forbidden City from the outside:

Many Chinese tourists wear traditional clothing for photos around the Forbidden City, and our tour guide insisted we take a photo:

Gave a presentation in Chinese class on this, so was very excited to go inside!

The Forbidden City was built with the Emperor as the focus. For example, the Emperor would be carried up the steps over these massive carved rock slabs:

The roofs on each of the buildings were intricately decorated. In the photo below, each of the creatures lining the roof have a different meaning, and 10 figures denotes the building as having the highest status. Whereas a building of lesser importance would have fewer figures.

After exploring the Forbidden City with our tour guide, we headed to the Great Wall! There are a couple of ways to get up the mountain to the wall – we took the chair lift up and the mountain slides back down.

We were lucky to have beautiful weather (though it was pretty chilly) and very few people visiting. Our tour guide showed us pictures in the summer, and the wall is packed with visitors. We were able to walk along the between guard houses – these guard houses along the wall were used to house soldiers.

View of the wall from inside a guard house:

Headed back down the mountain!

We flew back to Shanghai that evening – super packed day but learned a lot and saw some amazing sights that I had been looking forward to since studying about them.