BEIJING -- On Oct. 1, when Beijing pulled out all the stops to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Communist China, a parade of thousands passed the quintessential symbol of the ancient regime -- the Forbidden City.

For nearly five centuries, high walls sealed off the Middle Kingdom's emperors and empresses, advisors, concubines and eunuchs from the outside world. Today, a giant portrait of Chairman Mao gazes down from above the Forbidden City's main gateway. The Great Helmsman of the New China looks out over Tiananmen Square -- the largest public square on Earth -- toward the mausoleum where his embalmed body is displayed.

Back in 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party won out over the Nationalists and Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang army fled to Taiwan, the victorious forces considered tearing down the Forbidden City. Fortunately, they didn't. The imperial palace, the largest royal compound of wooden buildings in the world, is now a museum.

In fact, while seemingly everything in the Chinese capital appears on a scale designed to awe -- from imperial times to the present -- the finest treasures once housed within the Forbidden City are now in tiny Taiwan, at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. And with the warming of relations between the two governments, direct flights now link the two capitals. A three-hour flight connects Beijing (capital of the People's Republic of China) with Taipei (capital of the Republic of China, aka Taiwan) -- linking the palace with its treasures and making it easier for tourists to see both sites.

GETTING STARTED

Allow the good part of a day to see part of the Forbidden City -- headquarters of the Ming and Ching Dynasties since the early 15th century. The larger-than-life halls of state and the human-scale royal family quarters are spread out over 178 acres.

Go early in the morning to avoid the daily crush of 30,000 visitors and get the official self-guided audio tour since once inside the massive, red walls, disorientation can set in. It's hard to keep straight the Hall of Mental Cultivation, the Earthly Tranquility Palace, the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Yes, you could use a cup of coffee, but Starbucks was banished from the palace grounds in a fit of nationalism back in 2007.

A masterpiece of Chinese design with neo-Confucian order, the Forbidden City was built in accordance with values wedding heaven and earth, yin and yang. The basic tour goes from south to north. It moves from the grand courtyard designed to hold tens of thousands for an imperial audience to ever more intimate spaces, ending with the delights of the Imperial Garden's trees, flowers and rockeries, and the buildings accommodating the royal household. Legend has it there were 9,999 rooms within the Forbidden City, just one less than the 10,000 rooms of the heavenly palace.

To savor the Forbidden City in all its post-imperial glory, get off the beaten track. Wander down side promenades, get lost, rest, continue on.

Since the palace buildings are wood and fires were common, most of the existing buildings, copies of earlier ones, date from after the 18th century. All are in traditional classical Chinese style, the culmination of 2,000 years of refinement.

Though physical and mental exhaustion may be setting in, do pay the nominal additional fee to enter the Hall of Clocks. Many of the golden and bejeweled timepieces were gifts from European diplomats, selected to delight the emperor.