Tiananmen Square

2009 08 24 - Day 59 – Beijing

Tiananmen Square is the largest city square in the world, and best known outside China for the military crackdown on political reform protests in 1989. It certainly felt massive, a sensation enhanced perhaps by the smog which meant that you couldn't see from one end to the other!
I'd heard anecdotally (though Wikipedia disagrees) that it could hold a million people.  Wandering around it, I could imagine that being accurate... but, while pondering this impressive thought, an even more mind-boggling one struck me:
if a million Chinese people visited the square every day, then it would be more than three years before every Chinese citizen had visited!
It's difficult to illustrate the size of the square with a photograph without taking to the skies, so here are a couple of features:

Rose-tinted revolutionary rememberances.

The view to the north, towards the southern entrance of the Forbidden City – partially covered by scaffold as part of cosmetic restorations in preparation for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China in October.