The walk in one sentence
Most visitors go into the Forbidden City and never walk around it, which is a mistake, because the palace is a walled city and its walls are the best-preserved part of it. The circuit outside is about three and a half kilometres of flat pavement along the moat, and it gives you the building from four sides instead of one - including the side that has never been open to visitors.
Morning - the moat and the three unobstructed towers
The palace compound is 961 metres north to south and 753 metres east to west, occupying some 720,000 square metres, and its wall runs 3,428 metres at ten metres high. Outside that wall is the moat - locally called the tongzihe, the tube river - fifty-two metres across, and it is the reason the wall still looks the way it does: nothing has been built against it. We begin at the north-west corner, where the first of four corner towers stands, and walk anti-clockwise so that the light is behind us. The corner towers were completed in 1420 and have survived unaltered; each looks simple from a distance and is not simple at all, being a stack of one triple-eaved square pavilion, four double-eaved gable-and-hip roofs and two single-eaved ones, giving twenty-eight upturned eaves in total. Once you know to count them, the towers stop looking decorative and start looking engineered.
Midday - the western moat and the unvisited face
The west side is the quiet one. Here the wall has no gate and no queue, and you can see the watch-platform walkway at the top of the rampart, the drainage provisions built into the parapet, and how the moat was designed as a working piece of defence rather than as landscaping. We cross the south-west corner tower, then the south wall, and finish the circuit at the north-west. Your guide uses this stretch to explain the palace as a security system: gates that separated officials by rank, the shift between the wall and the water, and why a tenth-century Chinese city put a river around its ruler rather than a road.
Lunch
A restaurant near the north gate, outside the palace wall.
Afternoon - Jingshan and the whole axis
Across the road from the north gate is Jingshan, the hill raised from the spoil of the moat excavations, and the climb to the Wanchun Pavilion on its summit is short and disproportionately rewarding. From the top the entire palace lies south of you, roof behind roof on a single line, and the Drum and Bell Towers stand due north on the same line: this is the Beijing Central Axis, inscribed by UNESCO on 27 July 2024 as the longest urban axis in the world at 7.8 kilometres, with fifteen component elements and a property area of 589 hectares. It is the one place where the design of the city is visible instead of described.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
