The Forbidden City
I'm telling you, the first thing I'm going to do when I get home is rewatch Mulan! I want to see how much I can understand from the movie now that I've been to China. Apparently the storyline comes from a Chinese poem. The teacher from BRS that came with us to the Forbidden City told us that we could learn a lot about the plot of Mulan from the trip to the Forbidden City. So rich/influential families sent their daughters to the emperor to become concubines and from these concubines the emperor selected an empress. Mulan's parents wanted to send Mulan to the emperor as one of these concubines and she didn't want to do this, choosing to fight in place of her father and eventually becoming empress that way (Disney couldn't include all of that and have the movie be G-rated!). When you get to the picture of the garden, the place where the concubines stayed is somewhere around there and it's called something like the "House of High Expectations."
Tian An Men Square
Many of us also remember Tian An Men Square because this is where the student protest took place and countless students were massacred by the government in 1989. The students went on a hunger strike, wanting the government to speak with student-elected representatives and wanting free media. After almost 3 weeks of protest, the government sent in tanks. The government admitted a few hundred deaths, but the real number of deaths is likely to be much higher. This was a very sad event and brought worldwide attention to the supposed "Gate of Heavenly Peace." I was told that people don't like to talk about this event here, which is interesting because in America I feel like we talk about mistakes we have made, such as slavery, even in schools, but this event was relatively recent (only 2 years before I was born!) so that could be part of the reason why it's low key.