A few weekends ago we had a chance to go out sightseeing around Beijing with some friends. We went to the Drum and Bell Towers. They are old towers built next to each other in the 13th century. They were used to announce the time and were the official timepiece of the Chinese government til 1924 (Wikipedia teaches me so much!)
We had to climb some crazy steep stairs to get to the top, but there was a nice view of the city from each of them. At the drum tower we waited 20 minutes to see the "drum show." It was pretty theatrical and the drummers were really getting into it swinging their arms around and posing a lot.
The drum tower was pretty cool. Only one of 25 original drums was left, but they had good replicas of the others. They also had a couple different ancient time telling machines. Water ran through a couple of barrels on one of them and every 14 minutes or so it would ring a bell. It's amazing how accurately they were able to tell time with them.
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