Aug 29 2008
The Forbidden City (Palace Museum)
There are many detailed and formal introduction about the Forbidden City or Palace Museum already. Therefore we won’t waste you time to bore you with all the subtle details about this attraction. Let’s have a general view about the Forbidden City from a slight different angle.
History
Beijing was a very important city of China since two thousand years ago. However, it was not the capital city until the Mongol established Yuan Dynasty in 1271. Since then Beijing became the real political center of China. The site of the Forbidden City was part of the Imperial City during the Yuan Dynasty.
The Forbidden City was actually built in the Ming Dynasty. The first emperor of Ming settled his capital in Nanjing which is located in south part of China. But his son was based in Beijing when he still was a prince. After the prince inheritaged the crown, he decided to move the capital from Nanjing to Beijing and construct a grand new palace there in 1406. The massive construction lasted fifteen years, and required more than a million labors. Precious materials. such as the Phoebe zhennan wood, large blocks of marble and specially baked paving bricks were transported to the new capital for the Forbidden City project.
After the Ming Dynasty was defeated by rebel forces led by Li Zicheng and Manchu army which was a minority tribe from northeast part of China, Qing Dynasty was established in Beijing by the Manchus.
The Forbidden City became the imperial city of the new power.
After being the home of 24 emperors—fourteen of the Ming Dynasty and ten of the Qing Dynasty—the Forbidden City ceased being the political center of China in 1912 with the abdication of Puyi, the last Emperor of China. Puyi sold many treasures to finance his expensive lifestyle, while others were stolen by palace eunuchs. Under an agreement with the new Republic of China government, Puyi remained in the Inner Court, while the Outer Court was given over to public use, until he was evicted after a coup in 1924. The Palace Museum was then established in the Forbidden City. In 1933, the Japanese invasion of China forced the evacuation of the national treasures in the Forbidden City. Part of the collection was returned at the end of World War II, but the other part was evacuated to Taiwan in 1947 under orders by Chiang Kai-shek, whose Kuomintang was losing the Chinese Civil War. This relatively small but high quality collection was kept in storage for many years since the KMT still hoped to return to the mainland. Finally, in 1965, they again became public, at the core of the National Palace Museum in Taipei.
The Forbidden City was declared a World Heritage Site in 1987 by UNESCO as the “Imperial Palace of the Ming and Qing Dynasties”.
Layout
The Forbidden City is the world’s largest surviving palace complex and covers 72 ha. It is a rectangle 961 metres from north to south and 753 metres from east to west. It consists of 980 surviving buildings with 8,707 bays of rooms. The Forbidden City was designed to be the centre of the ancient, walled city of Beijing. It is enclosed in a larger, walled area called the Imperial City. The Imperial City is, in turn, enclosed by the Inner City; to its south lies the Outer City.
The Forbidden City remains important in the civic scheme of Beijing. The central north-south axis remains the central axis of Beijing. This axis extends to the south through Tiananmen gate to Tiananmen Square, the ceremonial centre of the People’s Republic of China. To the north, it extends through the Bell and Drum Towers to Yongdingmen. Interestingly, this axis is not exactly aligned north-south, but is tilted by slightly more than two degrees. Researchers now believe that the axis was designed in the Yuan Dynasty to be aligned with Xanadu, the other capital of the empire.
Treasures and Collections
The collections of the Palace Museum are based on the Qing imperial collection. In 1912, with the abdication of Puyi, the last Emperor of China, the Forbidden City was no longer a imperial palace. Puyi sold many treasures to finance his expensive lifestyle, while others were stolen by palace eunuchs. Even though, according to the results of a 1925 audit, some 1.17 million items were still stored in the Forbidden City. In addition, the imperial libraries housed one of the country’s largest collections of ancient books and various documents, including government documents of the Ming and Qing dynasties.
From 1933, the threat of Japanese invasion forced the evacuation of the most important parts of the Museum’s collection. After the end of World War II, this collection was returned to Nanjing. However, with the Communists’ victory imminent in the Chinese Civil War, the Nationalist government decided to ship the pick of this collection to Taiwan. Of the 13,427 boxes of evacuated artifacts , 2,972 boxes are now housed in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Almost ten thousand boxes were returned to Beijing, but 2,221 boxes remain today in storage under the charge of the Nanjing Museum.
After 1949, the Museum conducted a new audit as well as a thorough search of the Forbidden City, uncovering a number of important items. In addition, the government moved items from other museums around the country to replenish the Palace Museum’s collection. It also purchased and received donations from the public.
Travel Information
Ticket Price:
April - October: RMB60 pp
November - March: RMB40 Pp
Hours:
October 16 ～April 15, 8:30～16:30，Stop selling ticket at 15:30
April 16 ～October 15，8:30～17:00，Stop selling ticket at 16:00
Transportation:
Address：No.4 Jingshanqianjie St. Dongcheng District, Beijing
(This is the North Gate, tourists usually take the South Gate at Tiananmen Square.)
Bus: Np.1、2、4、5、10、20、22、52、54、57、120、802、T1 at Zhongshan Park Station or Tiananmen Station
Bus: No. 9、17、44、48、53、59、66、110、307、803、808、819、922、T4、T7 at Qianmen Station；
Bus: No. 101、103、103Fast、109、812、814 at Gugong Station
Subway line 1: at Tiananmen West Station or Tiananmen East Station
Websites：
Official Website of the Fobidden City
A Informative Forbidden City Website
The Taipei Palace Museum Website
The “Purple Wall” of Forbidden City
[...] In the Forbidden City of Beijing, there are four 3-floor Corner Towers （角楼）at each corner of the wall. The Corner Tower were built for appreciation only, rather than designed to allow the shooting of arrows, as with the Arrow Towers on each city gate of Beijing. Legend has it that the emperor gave craftsmen only nine days to design the corner towers, but after eight days thought, the craftsmen found themselves bereft of ideas. The craftsmen were sitting in a teahouse hoping for an idea when a man they thought was an old peddler trying to sell a cricket cage approached them. They tried to repulse the “peddler” and send him away, but he smiled and said, “Look closely; this is not ordinary cricketcage.” The craftsmen realized what the old peddler was showing them was a finely crafted structure with 9 beams, 18 columns and 72 ridges. The peddler was actually the master craftsman Lu Ban, who had become an immortal, so the craftsmen created the corner towers using the cricketcage as a model and thus added something new to the world’s architectural heritage. [...]