July 10th: The Forbidden City and Clocks

Today was the Forbidden City, it was really neat. While at the Forbidden City we found out a lot of interesting things like how the Emperor had 27 Concubines and an Empress. We also found out that the Emperor and Empress had two separate rooms that were across from each other. At one point in time the Emperor ended up leaving the Forbidden City for one of his concubines and when he eventually left the city he caught smallpox and died. Before the Emperor had died he found an interest in clocks because he was introduced to them by a Westerner. His clocks are now in a museum but in total he had about 999,000 clocks. Also at the Forbidden City we got to look through the Imperial gardens. When we were there we sat down to take a break and a person just started to draw Lyla's (Yi Li's) picture on a plate and it turned out to look just like her. It was so cool because he only did it in about 2 minutes.