Outside the Hall of Harmony and Peace 雍和宫

We were quickly ushered out of the Hall of Heavenly Kings as it was incredibly crowded inside the hall. I was confronted with the next hall in the Beijing Lama Temple. The Hall of Harmony and Peace when translated to Chinese is confusingly named the Yonghe Temple which was basically the name of the Beijing Lama Temple. The Hall of Harmony and Peace is the main hall of the temple and it is not surprisingly filled with people. There was a crowd of people outside maybe deciding to see if they will be going in or not.

I was taking my time outside to see what was so interesting about this place. There was a fountain like structure off to the side of the hall but it doesn’t have any water. For some reason this has become something like a wishing fountain and there were people throwing one yuan coins at the thing. It has become some sort of game since they aim for the coin to land in a nice position, usually the top of the fountain. As the top of the fountain is exceedingly small, this is an extremely tough task. Sometimes they would try to make the coin land inside a hole on the top of the fountain, as I said, it is like a game.

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