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Forbidden City
A walled enclosure of central Beijing, China,
containing the palaces of 24 emperors in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Formerly
closed to the public (hence its name), it is now a vast museum and a major
tourist attraction His mission now was to report on the latest bad
omens, typhoons off the
Cantonese coast, a comet seen above the Gobi Desert. These things spoke of
Heaven's weariness and a chaos that could end an emperor's rule.
When the Forbidden City emerged out of the North China Plain at the start of the
15th century, it was the biggest complex of palaces in the world. It still is.
It was designed to reflect the eternal glory of the Ming Emperors. One hundred
thousand men built it and at night their kilns lit up the surrounding plains.
One hundred million bricks, two hundred million tiles, timber from the trees of
southern nanmu, trees that took four years to get here by river and the Grand
Canal. When the work was over, the people vanished, leaving the city to an
emperor and a court who served him. Sealed off from the world, it aspired to
contain all the cosmos within its walls, a universe within a universe.
At the center of this controlled universe, the imperial throne. All power flowed
from this room. Around it, a fabled 9,999 rooms, the yellows were for power, the
reds for good luck, and everywhere the imperial dragons to bring the rains and
make the land prosper. One carving of dragons decorated a single piece of marble
so vast that it was transported in winter along a highway of ice. When it was
found to be too big, legend has it that the emperor's soldiers whipped the
marble until it buckled and moved on. There were 18 provinces in the empire. And
intelligence reports and tax ledgers arrived in the Forbidden City every day. An
empire of 150 million people, Han Chinese, Mongol, Manchu, was governed from
here by the world's oldest and most sophisticated bureaucratic machine.
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( Sept 8 )
