The Forbidden City was the Chinese sovereign palace from the
Ming dynasty to the end of the Qing dynasty—the years 1420 to 1912. It is
situated in the centre of Beijing, China, and now houses the Palace Museum. It
served as the home of emperors and their family house as well as the official
and political centre of Chinese government for almost 500 years.
Assemble from 1406 to 1420, the compound consists of 980
buildings and covers 72 ha (180 acres). The palace complex represents
traditional Chinese palatial architecture and has influenced cultural and
architectural developments in East Asia and elsewhere. The Forbidden City was
notify a World Heritage Site in 1987, and is listed by UNESCO as the largest
gathering of conserve ancient wooden structures in the world.
Since 1925, the Forbidden City has been under the charge of
the Palace Museum, whose large scale collection of artwork and artifacts’ were
built upon the imperial collections of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Hunk of the
museum's some collection is now located in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. With over 14 million yearly visitors, the
Palace Museum is the most visited Museum in the world.
History
The Forbidden City as reproduce in a Ming dynasty painting. When
Hongwu Emperor's son Zhu Di became the Yongle Emperor, he moved the capital
from Nanjing to Beijing, and building began in 1406 on what would become the
Forbidden City.
Construction lasted
14 years and wants more than a million workers. Material used cover whole logs
of precious Phoebe zhennan wood find in the jungles of south-western China, and
biggest hunk of marble from quarries near Beijing. The floors of crucial halls
were paved with "golden bricks” majorly deface paving bricks from Suzhou.
By October, the Manchus had reach ascendency in northern
China, and pomp was held at the Forbidden City to proclaim the young Shunzhi
Emperor as leader of all China under the Qing dynasty.
In 1860, during the Second Opium War, Anglo-French forces
took control of the Forbidden City and cover it until the end of the war. In 1900 Empress Dowager Cixi fled from the
Forbidden City during the Boxer Rebellion, vacate it to be occupied by
involuntary of the agreement powers until the following year. The East Glorious
Gate under restoration as part of the 16-year fixing procedure.
After the
establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, some deface was done
to the Forbidden City as the country was sweep up in revolutionary zeal. During
the Cultural rebellion, however, further damage was stop when Premier Zhou
Enlai sent an army battalion to guard the city.
The Forbidden City
was notifying a World Heritage Site in 1987 by UNESCO as the "royal Palace
of the Ming and Qing Dynasties", due to its major place in the development
of Chinese architecture and culture. It is recently conducted by the Palace
Museum, which is convey out a sixteen-year repair project to repair and
reconstruct all buildings in the Forbidden City to their pre-1912 state.
In current years, the
presence of commercial enterprises in the Forbidden City has become
controversial, A Starbucks store that opened in 2000 sparked protest and
finally closed on 13 July 2007. Chinese media also took notice of a pair of
souvenir shops that decline to confess Chinese citizens in sequence to price-gouge
foreign customers in 2006.
