Visiting a castle is like peeping in the aura of ruling and royal class. It reflects how the ruling class lived before the advent of the private jet and the mega-yacht. And even before the construction of the fairy-tale Rhine castles and their lavish French counterparts along the Loire, came the squat, round fortress castles with their moats and drawbridges. Castles are significant both as the homes of rulers and their courts and also as sites of great sieges and battles. Let’s explore the magnificent castles around the globe.
Forbidden City
An entire mysterious city of the narrow high-walled alley, pathways leading on to courtyards with a single story, well-decorated temple-esque buildings, and the west and east palace compounds, are just as interesting as the much photographed main gates and temples. These run in a direct line on a south to the north axis from the huge Mao painting at the Meridian Gate to the Gate of Divine Prowess. These were the living quarters of the royal family and concubines, where a lot of the intrigue took place as well as important business, running the country. The Forbidden City was also a community, and as with any community, especially the one where a lot of power is concerned, there was more drama than an average soap opera—the historic personal drama is fascinating stuff. I've seen 'The Last Emperor' so I had an idea about the end of the story, but each generation had its own intrigues. The men vied for power but the women were there as well. In a more formal way, the concubines had a defined hierarchy, they were recruited every four years, competed for favour with the emperor, and promoted and demoted at his will.
Summer Palace
Three thousand structures make up the Summer Palace, which is like a vast museum of traditional Chinese art, architecture, and gardening. Pavilions, bridges, towers, statues, and corridors are included in this figure as well as shrines and larger buildings. The whole environment is carefully designed as a showcase for the intricate beauty of Chinese arts to complement the equally revered natural environment. A huge, two-story boat made of elaborately carved marble is understandably one of the main attractions, another is the Long Corridor, a richly covered decorated walkway running 730 m and incorporating over 14,000 individual paintings depicting traditional scenes, great architecture, myths, and heroes.
Schloss Neuschwanstein
Neuschwanstein is not a thousand-year-old castle build for defense like most other castles, but the dream castle of a Bavarian king in the 19th century. In 1869, King Ludwig II began to build this castle in the sky. The castle is set high in the Bavarian Alps on the site of the ancient ruins of two castles— Vorder and Hinterhohenschwangau. Its snow-white walls and tall towers are the very images of a fairy-tale castle befitting a king. It is built in the style of the late Romanesque castles of the Hohenstaufen dynasty as interpreted by King Ludwig II.
The construction of Schloss Neuschwanstein was never completed. A castle keep was to be built in the main courtyard that would have towered above the existing structures in true fairy-tale style, but the tower was never built.
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