Temple of Heaven

Dennis and I went to see the Temple of Heaven last week. The architecture looked a lot like the Forbidden city except the walls, buildings, and other structures were all much shorter.

One thing that I saw that was new was a veranda whose floor layout was shaped in 2 circles partly overlapping eachother. I haven't seen that before in any asian country.

They also had an "echo wall" there. It was the inside of one the circular walls that had been surrounded and was built in a near perfect circle, so apparently if you yell parallel to the wall on one side you can be heard by a friend on the opposite side of the circle because the sound keeps bouncing and rolling along the wall.

Another thing that was different about the Temple of Heaven was that because the temple *is* dedicated to Heaven, if there were multiple doorways, the big middle one was dedicated for God only. Not even the emperor walked through that archway. In contrast, at the Forbidden City, the biggest of 3 doors was used by the emperor only.