Almost everyone who visits the Forbidden City walks straight down the central axis from the Meridian Gate to the north gate and leaves, which means almost everyone misses the buildings that architects come to Beijing to see. The four corner towers sit at the corners of the palace wall, one at each angle of the rectangle, and they are the most intricate pieces of carpentry in the whole complex. The moat that runs beneath them is wider than most visitors expect and, outside the palace, forms a continuous public walk that takes about an hour.
The corner towers
Each tower is a small, three-storey pavilion perched on the corner of the wall and capped by a cross-ridge roof - a roof form in which two main ridges cross at right angles, producing a forest of ridges, hips and eaves. The traditional description is nine beams, eighteen columns and seventy-two ridges, and the point of the number is the complexity: every ridge has to be supported, and no two views of the roof are the same. The towers are visible from outside the palace wall, and the north-east one is the easiest to see clearly, since it stands above the moat where the wall meets the palace's north-east corner.
The moat walk
The palace moat is roughly fifty metres wide and runs about three and a half kilometres around the rectangle of the palace. Outside it, a paved path and a strip of planting follow the water almost the whole way round, lined with willows and, on the south side, with the roadway that crosses in front of Tiananmen. It is used by joggers, cyclists, dog walkers and office workers on their lunch break, and it is one of the few places in central Beijing where you can walk for an hour with the palace wall continuously in view and see almost no other tourists. In summer there is shade along much of it; in winter the moat freezes and the ice is left alone.
Practical notes
The moat path is free and always open, and it needs no ticket or reservation. To walk the full circuit, start at the north gate and go east, then south along the eastern wall, west along the southern side and back north - about an hour at a stroll, with metro stations at several points along the way. The corner towers themselves are inside the palace and can only be seen at a distance from the wall or from the moat path; the best unobstructed views are from the north-east and north-west corners, which are also the quietest parts of the circuit.
