Food inside the Forbidden City

There is no cafeteria and no sit-down restaurant inside the palace. The kiosks are small and the selection is basic: bottled drinks, snacks, simple lunch options. Prices are higher than outside because you are a captive audience. A bottle of water costs noticeably more inside than it does on the street outside.

Bring water and snacks. A 1-litre bottle carries you through most of a morning visit. There are water refill points (fountains or café taps) scattered through the palace if you need them, but I recommend starting with enough to get you through.

What you cannot do is step out for lunch and come back. This is the part people get wrong, and it follows from the shape of the place rather than from any rule about food: the route is one-way, your booking admits you once, and the exit puts you a kilometre from where you went in. Whatever you were planning to eat, eat it before you go through the Meridian Gate or after you come out of Shenwumen.

Which is not much of a hardship, because the north end is the better end for it anyway. You come out into the Jingshan and Beihai neighbourhood, where the hutong streets behind the park have far more to eat than the tourist-facing strip around Tiananmen. The order I use on my own days off: out of Shenwumen, straight up Jingshan for the view while you are still warm from the walk, then down the far side and eat.

So, practically: carry a litre of water and something you can eat on your feet, accept that the kiosk prices are a bad deal and pay them anyway if you need to, and treat lunch as the thing that happens after the palace rather than during it. Three hours inside is a long stretch to go without water in a July courtyard, and a perfectly short one to go without a meal.

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