the forbidden city of course was full of people photographing, themselves like the lady in the lead picture (which i found amazing in the iuxtaposition of a single figure against those incountable roofs), each other, the architecture, also me. a european man with a ponytail is so extraordinary that especially gals wanted me to pose together with them. but how can i blame them when i was interested in chinese faces and people.
a long time ago i was quite good in fermi estimates, so i tried to get an idea about the numbers of pictures taken every day in the forbidden city, but alas, i was not able to do a qualified guess.
the availability of electronic gadgets was stunning and gave me a little bit of an idea about the development of spending capacity now in the middle class of china. and in terms of numbers, this middle class already is big.
instead of struggling with maths, i preferred to fall back to photographing roofs, tiles and numerous shades of red on the walls. satisfying that was.