You are a participant in the 14th annual Patana Year 10 History Study Tour of Beijing. I know you will thoroughly enjoy the experience. You will learn a lot of history and you will also have a good time with your friends. I hope it will be one of the best memories of your Patana years.

Beijing has been the capital of China for over 2000 years. Genghis Khan burned it down in 1215 and Kublai Khan made it the capital of the Mongol Empire. All the Ming and Qing emperors lived in Beijing. In the early 1400s the Ming emperor Yong Le built the Forbidden City which is now in the centre of Beijing. The last Qing emperor lived there until 1924. In 1949 Mao Zedong made Beijing the capital of the People’s Republic of China.

Beijing has seen many changes in the last 50 years. In the 1960s a million Red Guards gathered in Beijing to worship Mao. Little remains of Mao’s Beijing except Mao himself. It is now a smart city of high rise shopping centres, traffic jams and Starbucks cafes.

So we will meet the wealth of new China but we will also see the remnants of old China: the Great Wall, the Summer Palace and the Temple of Heaven. We will see where Mao’s Communist Revolution took place and the changes since Mao. All of this will be of great value to your studies. Above all you will get a feeling for China and its history. From this feeling will come interest and understanding.

So sit back and have a great time discovering the fascinating history of Beijing

J Wood, History teacher