Story By: Alex Cope, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: AsiaWire Report
Picture Credit: AsiaWire
These photos of a tourist letting her young child urinate onto the floor of the 800-year-old Forbidden City palace complex have caused outrage on social media.
The photos were taken by an onlooker at the Forbidden City complex of palaces, a World Heritage Site in the Chinese capital Beijing.
In the photos, a female tourist can be seen helping her young son to urinate on the floor of the Ming dynasty palaces, with a puddle of pee visible next to the youngster’s feet.
The images were posted online to the social media page ‘What Beijingers Don’t Know About Beijing’ and the caption claimed the woman threw the used tissue paper on the floor after her child had weed.
Social media users slammed the images, with one user saying the boy was “spoiled” and “doomed in future”.
A staff member at the Forbidden City told local media that there were 14 public toilets at the site with additional temporary facilities added for peak seasons.
The workers added: “The space is too big and we can’t supervise all visitors, we can only patrol inside. This kind of incident happens very rarely.
“In this sort of situation where a small child is occasionally desperate for the toilet, we would definitely not order them to pay a fine but would tell them off and educate them, and make them clean it up.”
Over 17 million people visited the Forbidden City last year with the palace complex one of the museums to receive the most visitors in the world.
The palaces were constructed from 1406 to 1420 and the complex consists of 980 buildings. The Forbidden City was the Chinese imperial palace from the Ming dynasty to the end of the Qing dynasty (1420 – 1912).
In 2015, China’s President Xi Jinping called for public toilets at tourist sites in the country to be modernised into more hygienic facilities.