Pictures they posted showed the flaming wreck surrounded by several police and emergency vehicles, directly in front of the sign on the Tiananmen gate reading: “May the great unity of the world’s people last for 10,000 years.”
Soon afterwards police erected high curtain like barricades directly in front of the Mao portrait, blocking passers by from viewing the scene. The main road in front of the Forbidden City was later re opened to vehicles but no pedestrians were allowed near the scene of the incident.
Tiananmen Square is surrounded by several of communist China’s key buildings and institutions, with Mao’s mausoleum on the south side, the Great Hall of the People to the west, and China’s national museum to the east.
The imperial Forbidden City, a world heritage site that sees 14 million visitors a year, is on the north side, with the Tiananmen Gate as its entrance, where Mao proclaimed the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
In the past it has been the site of protests aside from the 1989 student demonstrations.
In January 1982, a woman taxi driver who had been fined for failing to fulfil her quota of fares drove her vehicle into a crowd at the Jinshui bridge, killing five people and injured 19 more. She was executed 20 days later.
Seven members of the Falungong religious cult set themselves on fire on the square in 2001, five of them suffering serious burns.
In May 2007 a man from Xinjiang, the far western region home to Muslim Uighurs, tried to set fire to the Mao portrait and was immediately detained.
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