The Forbidden City In Beijing: China's Hidden Heart

Architectural Review, The, April, 2001 by Jim Antoniou

At the beginning of the fifteenth century AD, the third Ming Emperor, Yung-lo created one of the most dazzling architectural masterpieces in the world. The Forbidden City, encrusted in the centre of China's capital Beijing, displays an extraordinarily harmonious balance between buildings and open space within a symmetrical layout. It contains immense courtyards, terraces and stairways, and buildings decorated with golden roofs, vermilion columns and green, red and yellow facings. The Forbidden City conveys a strong image of wealth and earthly power and surpasses Versailles in its majesty, without abandoning a sense of human scale.

Beginnings

A city where Beijing now stands was an important commercial centre since the ninth century BC. Once the seat of the principality of Yan, it later became the capital of the Liao and subsequently of the Jin. The Tartars from the north built a city near this location as early as the tenth century.

When Marco Polo visited the site, he described it as the city of Khan (1267), with uplifted roofs punctuating the green foliage of mulberry trees. Beijing of today is some 500 years old, with many of its famous buildings completely rebuilt. When Yung-lo established Beijing as his permanent Chinese capital, between 1404 and 1420, he employed some 200 000 workers to build the imperial city. His three architects, Hsu Tai, Yuan An and Feng Chiao were given the brief to build a large, rich and mysterious palace to serve as the Emperor.'s metropolis to the world. The Emperor's role was a complex one. Audience halls were needed for receiving delegations, together with temples for ritual purification and processional ways. He also required large domestic quarters with gardens for himself and his family as well as administrative accommodation.

The city of Beijing consisted of three concentric and rectangular walled areas (with a fourth area developed to the south, known as the Outer City, or the Chinese City, eventually enclosed for strategic reasons and to protect the ceremonial complexes in that area). The outermost of Beijing's concentric rectangles housed the lower ranking civil servants and was known as the Inner City, or Tartar City (all Chinese inhabitants were driven out into the Outer City in the seventeenth century). Within these walls (alas, no longer existing) was the Imperial City, restricted for the use of high-ranking officials. The Forbidden City was embedded at the centre, reserved for the Emperor, his family and court attendants (most of whom by tradition were eunuchs). This compound, about 950m long from north to south and some 750m wide (the size of Bloomsbury in London), lay behind high, heavily guarded walls, surrounded by a moat. Here, the Emperor resided from November to February every year, the busiest period for official c eremonies.

Symbolic significance

The City was enmeshed in ritualistic and religious concepts. Legend has it that the very structure of the Forbidden City was conceived in a dream by Yung-lo's tutor, a visionary monk. He imagined an extraterrestrial city, where the Lord of Heaven resided in a purple enclosure (believed to be a constellation formed by 15 heavenly bodies turning round the polestar). According to Chinese cosmology, the colour purple was a symbol of joy and happiness and also that of the polestar. So the Emperor established himself as the Son of Heaven, with the mandate to maintain harmony between the human and natural world, balancing the vastness of nature with a uniform modular system of rectangular courtyards and buildings. He and his city became linked to the divine forces of the universe. Therefore, the domicile of the Emperor was a purple city at the centre of the temporal world.

Yung-lo's residence became known as Tzu Chin Ch'eng, meaning 'The Purple City (Ch'eng), of the polestar (Tzu), where one cannot enter (Chin)'. The literal meaning of China (Chunghua) is 'the country at the centre', leading to the idea of the Forbidden City being at the very centre of the world.

Planning principles

Chinese architecture developed early its own special characteristics with a high level of systematic forms, and continued in a more or less unbroken tradition. The ancient imperial culture was based on monumentality and on simple city planning principles.

The Forbidden City was constructed in accordance with ancient rules of spatial design, first used during the Han dynasty in building the city of Chang-an, between 206 BC and AD 220 (modern Xian). Among other things, these rules specified that the principal buildings had to be aligned along a straight axis, from north to south, flanked by a symmetrical arrangement of minor structures on parallel axes. This architectural convention was favourable with Yung-lo's claim that his city had symbolic importance. He believed that a centralized configuration of buildings would also serve as an emblem of the ordered heavens. Beijing emerged as a series of cities on a north-south axis, comprising of a sequence of monumental climaxes. Boulevards, between 20m and 45m wide, linked opposite gates, symmetrically placed in the length of the walls.