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The carnival of merry seniors exercising on parallel bars, moving in sync to the rhythm of tai chi or just having fun, kicking around a plumed jianzi (Chinese version of the shuttlecock), is almost evenly weighted by batches of schoolchildren clutching their satchels and exercise books, trying to get a look in through the cluster of human heads that seem to perennially crowd around the building entrances. There are no doors, but the interiors are cordoned off from the public.

The Temple of Heaven is probably the most ingenious example of a round edifice fitting happily into a square hole. The giant three-tier cylindrical structure of The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, mounted on a triple-layer marble altar, is set in a square courtyard. This pattern is repeated in the Imperial Vault, balanced on either side by the Echo Walls and again in the Altar to Heaven.

Taoists thought of the heaven as round and the earth as a square. So when the emperor, the intermediary between the heavenly beings and the mortals on earth, needed to solicit a good harvest on behalf of the earthlings, the place he chose to pray at, fittingly, reflected the metaphor of the meeting between earth and sky in its structural arrangement.

Tiantan is also a numerologist's ultimate fantasy. Each circular platform leading to the Hall of Prayer is nine steps above the last - nine being the highest positive single digit. The golden-tipped hall is 32 m high, is propped up by 28 pillars and no nails have been used in its construction. Four of the pillars are embossed with images of golden dragons, representing the four seasons, the 12 pillars surrounding them symbolizing 12 months, and the 12 outer ring pillars, the 12 divisions of day and night.

The obsession with numbers is taken to its height at the Circular Mound Altar. A single block of flat circular stone, where the Emperor would stand in the moment of his holy communion with the gods, stands atop three terraces, each approachable by four flights of stairs. The small marble disc is surrounded by blocks of artemisia leaf gray stones, spreading out in concentric circles, the number of slabs increasing in multiples of 9.

If the Forbidden City is the world's biggest siheyuan (courtyard residence), the giant barn-shaped Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests inside the temple grounds looks like its biggest granary.

At a time when the world's gaze is turned toward China, looking for some answers to sustaining livelihoods during a global economic crisis, the comparison assumes an added significance. Like Xi Cheng and her old friends, we live in hope.