Forbidden City - Names, History, Image gallery, Influences of the Forbidden City

The Imperial Palace in Beijing, the residence of the imperial rulers of China from its construction by 200 000 workmen in 1420 until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911. The last Emperor, Puyi, and his retinue resided here until their eviction in 1924. The walled and moated palace complex covers 74 ha/183 acres, and is the best preserved example of mediaeval Chinese architecture. The Imperial Palace Museum was established here in 1925.

Coordinates: 39°54′56″N, 116°23′27″E

This article is about The Chinese imperial palace in Beijing. For other uses of the term "Forbidden City", see Forbidden City (disambiguation).

The Forbidden City (Chinese: 紫禁城; literally "Purple Forbidden City") was the Chinese imperial palace during the mid-Ming and the Qing Dynasties. The Forbidden City is located in the middle of Beijing, China.

The Forbidden City is listed by UNESCO as the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures in the world. The Forbidden City was declared a World Heritage Site in 1987 as the "Imperial Palace of the Ming and Qing Dynasties."

The Palace Museum in the Forbidden City should not be confused with the National Palace Museum in Taiwan.

Names

The Forbidden City is known by many names. The name by which the site is most commonly known in English, "The Forbidden City," is a translation of the Chinese name Zijin Cheng (紫禁城), which literally means "Purple Forbidden City."

Rectangular in shape, the Forbidden City is the world's largest palace complex and covers 720,000 square meters (178 acres, or 0.28 square miles). The Forbidden City includes five halls, seventeen palaces, and numerous other buildings.

Rooms

The Forbidden Palace is reputed to have a total of 9,999.5 rooms.

The majority of buildings in the Forbidden City have an odd number of rooms, distributed symmetrically about an axis.

Walls

The wall around the Forbidden City has a gate on each side.

Sections

The Forbidden City is divided into two parts. The Inner Court includes the northern, eastern, and western parts of the Forbidden City, and centres on another three halls which were used for the day-to-day affairs of state.

Outside the main gate to the Forbidden City, the Meridian Gate faces a square where imperial corporal punishments were sometimes carried out.

Gardens

At the northern end of the Forbidden City is the imperial garden.

The Forbidden City is surrounded by royal gardens.

Symbols

The individual buildings within the Forbidden City housed many important members of the Chinese aristocracy.

Today, Tiananmen Gate in front of the Forbidden City is decorated with a portrait of Mao Zedong in the center and two placards to the left and right. This is also true of the Forbidden City palace itself.

Major Buildings

Major buildings include:

Meridian Gate Tiananmen Gate Gate of Supreme Harmony Gate of Divine Might Hall of Supreme Harmony Palace of Heavenly Purity

History

Construction

The site where the Forbidden City stands today was part of the imperial city during the Yuan dynasty.

The construction of the Forbidden City started in 1406 and took 14 years and an estimated 200,000 men.

Ming and Qing dynasty

From its 1420 completion to 1644, when a peasant revolt led by Li Zicheng invaded it, the Forbidden City served as the seat of the Ming Dynasty.

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. Under an agreement signed between the Qing imperial house and the new Republic of China government, Puyi was, however, allowed and, in fact, required to live within the walls of the Forbidden City.

After the revolution

Puyi stayed in the Forbidden City until 1924, when Feng Yuxiang took control of Beijing in a coup. Soon after, the Palace Museum was established in the Forbidden City. Having been the imperial palace for some five centuries, the Forbidden City houses numerous rare treasures and curiosities.

However, with the Japanese invasion of China, the safety of these national treasures were cast in doubt, and they were moved out of the Forbidden City. In 1947, after they had been moved from one location to another inside mainland China for many years, Chiang Kai-shek ordered many of the artifacts from the Forbidden City and the National Museum in Nanjing to be moved to Taiwan.

Image gallery

The imperial palace	Imperial palace staircase	The northwest tower	Rooftops of the Forbidden City
Tourists inside the Palace Museum	Architectures inside the Palace Museum	Bedchamber guardian lions	Ceiling of one of the buildings in the imperial garden
Nine Dragons screen	The emperor's throne	One of the many halls and palaces containing the emperor's imperial throne	Imperial roof decoration

Influences of the Forbidden City

Emperor Gia Long of Vietnam built a palace and fortress that was intended to be a smaller copy of the Chinese Forbidden City in the 1800s. The name of the inner palace complex in Vietnamese is translated literally as "Purple Forbidden City", which of course is the same as the Chinese name for Forbidden City in Beijing. The Last Emperor (1987) was the first feature film ever authorized by the government of the People's Republic of China to film in the Forbidden City. Giacomo Puccini's opera, Turandot, about the story of a Chinese princess, was performed inside the Forbidden City for the first time in 1998. In 2004, the French musician Jean Michel Jarre performed the live concert in the Forbidden City, accompanied by 260 musicians as part of the "Year of France in China" festivities. The 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle, Washington imitates three ancient Chinese architectural achievements located in Beijing: the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and the Summer Palace. A nearly exact replica of the dome from the throne room of the Imperial palace in Bejing's Forbidden City graces the 5th Avenue Theatre’s ceiling. A fictional city called Ba Sing Se in the cartoon series Avatar the Last Airbender is based upon the Forbidden City. William Bell's novel "Forbidden City" a novel of modern china, is based upon a Canadian reporter and his son Alexander or Alex for short (or Ahrek Shan Da, as most of his Chinese friends call him) go to Beijing to do a reports on the Beijing and its people. ^ Technically, Tiananmen Gate is not part of the Forbidden City.