Sometimes We Move to China: The Chaotian Palace & Nanjing Wall South Gate

This last month FLEW by. I can't believe its already December! We have almost been here for 4 months now. Crazyyyyyy. So sorry we have been terrible at posting our adventures lately. I warned you when I started this blog that I might be bad at it... But here is what our end of October & November looked like!

We went field trippin and found ourselves at,

The Chaotian Palace

This was a Palace during the Ming Dynasty, but now it is a museum. There are thousands of cultural artifacts everywhere! It was amazing. There were sculptures, pots, coins, jewelry and beautiful robes. It was so amazing to see the kinds of things they were able to make and how much detail they put into everything. I wish I had their crafting skills!

The front gate to the Chaotian Palace

The guardian gate keeper!

Statue of Confucius

We found the secret garden!

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Nanjing Wall South Gate

Nanjing is surrounded by a huge wall as you have seen from previous posts. It is huge! On this field trip we got to see the South Gate. This gate was surrounded by water so the only way to enter the city was boat. We actually learned that way back in the day water was one of the main means of transportation throughout the city. Pretty cool to imagine I think!

One thing that we learned here that I thought was interesting was about the stone bricks that make up the whole wall. Each brick has characters on it telling exactly where the brick came from and who was responsible for making it. When the wall was being built the new bricks would come in by boat and two soldiers would try to bang them together to test the quality of the bricks. If the bricks broke the first time they would be sent back to where they came from and who ever was responsible for them would have to remake them. Then the bricks would be sent back a second time and if they didn't pass the test again the soldiers would go directly to where the bricks came from and would kill those responsible for the weak bricks. So, it was important to have the names and location on each brick. I don't know about you but I definitely wouldn't have wanted to be in the brick business back then....