Layout of the Forbidden City, Beijing, China

Layout of the Forbidden City

Rectangular in shape, the Forbidden City is the world's largest palace complex. 960 meters from north to south and 750 meters from east to west, it covers 720,000 square meters.

View Map

The top of the north gate as seen from outside the moat

The Forbidden City is surrounded by a six meter deep, 52 meter wide moat.

Inside the moat, the outer wall is 10 meters high and 3,400 meters long. The walls are very thick (8.6 meters wide at the bottom and 6.7 meters wide at the top) and were specifically designed to withstand attacks by cannons.

The bricks of the wall are said to be made partly from white lime and glutinous rice while the cement is made partly from glutinous rice and egg whites! These incredible materials were said to make the wall extraordinarily strong.

A view of the Meridian Gate (south gate)
from the inside edge of the moat

It has been estimated that 12 million bricks were required for the outer wall alone.

Further, for fear that an enemy might try to tunnel into the city, the paving was made many layers thick - seven layers lengthwise and eight layers crosswise, totalling fifteen layers.

Relaxing in the shade of a large tree

Inside there are five halls, seventeen palaces, and numerous other buildings. The Forbidden Palace is reputed to have a total of 9,999 rooms. In some accounts, the Forbidden City has 9,999.5 rooms - the half-room, apparently, houses nothing more than a staircase.

Actually, depending on how the counting is done, the total is about 9,000.

The digit 9 was seen as a special, magic number, especially for emporers, because it is the highest value ordinal. Also, the word for nine in Chinese, 'jiu', is a homonym for 'long / lengthy'. The number of rooms has a further rationale : because the Forbidden City was on Earth, it was impossible to have 10,000 rooms, which would conflict with the number of rooms in the version found in Heaven because the number 10,000 symbolizes infinity.

Doors in the Forbidden City and imperial gardens were often decorated with nine rows of nine bolts.

The outer wall has a gate on each of its four sides. At the southern end is the 'Meridian Gate' (technically, Tian'AnMen Gate is not part of the Forbidden City), to the north is the 'Gate of Divine Might', which faces Jingshan Park. There are minor gates on the east and west walls.

The south west watch-tower,
as seen from ZhongShan park

There are unique and intricately structured towers on each of the four corners of the outer wall. These provide good views over both the palace and the city outside, and partly function as watchtowers. Each of the four towers has 9 roof beams, 18 pillars and 72 ridgepoles. You can rarely see such structures elsewhere.

The watch towers are ingeniously built using the magic number "9". Each of the three numbers are either 9 or multiples of 9, And the total of the three numbers is 9+18+72=99, which is a heavenly number only the Forbidden City is worthy of.

The Legend of the WatchTowers

Legend has it that when the Forbidden City was first built, there were no watch towers, only the high, thick red wall.

One night, Emperor QianLong dreamed of four watch towers standing at each corner. When he woke up he ordered that four watch towers be constructed, just like the ones in his dream.

The Minister of Works received the imperial edict and summoned the best craftsmen in the country to build the watch towers in only three months. Two shifts of top craftsmen built very impressive watch towers, but because they weren't quite like what the emperor had dreamed of, they were all destroyed and the craftsmen were all beheaded.

A third group of craftsmen was summoned. Understandably, they were so worried that they could hardly eat or sleep.

One evening, after a long day of work, while they were lying down resting, they heard the singing of grasshoppers. It was so noisy that one craftsman decided to investigate. He went out and saw an old man selling those grasshoppers for a very high price. The craftsman explained that he hoped to get some quiet, but the old man said "How can a grasshopper keep silent?"

Hearing the craftsman continue to argue with the old man, all the other craftsmen went out to see what was happening. On seeing the others, the old man lifted the cover and held his grasshopper cage high and said proudly, "Sirs, won't you buy my fine grasshopper in his fine cage?" Immediately, all eyes focused on the cage - it was exactly what they wanted!

The cage was made of thin sorghum stalks with eight sides and eight more at every corner. The roof was divided into three storeys. The first storey had upturned eaves on its four sides, and each of the four corners also had four small upturned eaves. The second storey was similar to the first, except that on its four upturned eaves were four triangular ridgepoles. Like the second, the third had four triangular ridgepoles, but on the ridgepoles were four more triangular ridgepoles, and on each of them stood four level ridgepoles.

The craftsmen built the four watch towers according to the design of the cage and the emperor was finally satisfied. The old man was believed to have been Lu Ban, the 'grandfather of all chinese carpenters'.

The Great Wall of China had a vital link to the Forbidden City. The Great Wall was constructed with watchtowers all along its structure. It was from these watchtowers that smoke signals could be sent as a way of communicating with the Forbidden City.

The Forbidden City can be divided into two parts.

The southern section, the 'Outer Court', consists of five halls used for ceremonial purposes and other official business. These include the magnificant Hall of Supreme Harmony. The northern section, the 'Inner Court', was where the emperor worked and lived with his family, eunuchs and maid-servants.

The Outer Court consists of large structures and enormous spaces. The first part of the Inner Court is a series of three halls that are a smaller mirror of the main three in the Outer Court, and then a grander version of the ancient hutong style of alleys and courtyards that serve as living quarters.

Between the Outer and Inner Courts, and between the courtyards of the Inner Court, are many high-walled alleys. The visitor can easily feel that they are in a maze! Some of the alleys are very long.

Because golden yellow had long been a symbol of the royal family and it is a dominant color in the Forbidden City. Roofs are constructed with yellow glazed tiles; decorations in the palace are often yellow; even the paving bricks on the floors of the halls are made a bit yellow by a special process.

In the ancient chinese theory of the Five Elements, each had an associated color. To the ancient Chinese, yellow represents earth - and the Earth, which for a long time was considered the center of the universe by our ancestors. Pictorially, yellow was placed in the middle of the five elements, to indicate that the earth is central and respected.

Later, this notion, combined with the idea of the great unification of Confucianism, bolstered the view that the united royal family, with the Han nationality as its main body, was an empire in the position of central earth, different from the surrounding foreign countries. Thus, yellow was associated with homage through connection to earth, providing a rational reasoning for the emperor's legitimacy and rule.

The imperial robes were also made in the traditional golden yellow - and also have images of the dragon on them. The use of yellow (and red/purple) and the dragon to distinguish the emperor from other mortals harks back to Legalism, a movement that sought to support the power of the emperor through the might of the state - and also to Confucianism, which saw the emperor as the chief model of virtue in the state. Color and other architectural features of the Forbidden City clearly marked out the emperor as the 'Son of Heaven'.

However, there is one exception : the royal library (WenYuanGe), has a black roof. The reason is that it was believed black represents water and so could extinguish fire - appropriate in a building full of paper!

On each corner of the roofs, there are small statuettes, the number of which designated the power of the person living within the building. The number 9 was reserved for the emperor. Only one building has 10 statuettes at each corner (not including the gargoyle guarding the rear and the phoenix in the front). This number symbolizes heaven and is the most holy building.

Originally the roofs were made mostly of wood, and to prevent the tiles from sliding off, wooden nails were used. However, without lightning rods, the palace roof would easily catch fire. Therefore, some alchemists suggested that symbols of the fish-tail star could be installed on the roof to prevent fire. Later, these symbols were replaced by glazed tiles which were shaped like lucky animals, some of them mythical.

On the roof of the Hall of Supreme Harmony, there is (starting from the front) :

an immortal riding a phoenix, followed by:
a dragon,
a phoenix,
a lion,
a heavenly steed,
a sea horse,
a SuAnNi,
a YaYu,
a XieZhi,
a DouNiu and
a HangShi.

This is the fixed pattern for the order of the animals.

The Hall of Supreme Harmony was the throne hall, so it has the most animals on the roof. No other buildings in the country were allowed to have more. The other buildings in the Forbidden City are relatively less important and, therefore, the number of small animals on the roof is reduced. The elimination starts from the back.

During the Han dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD), a characteristic ground plan was developed; it remained relatively constant through the centuries and applied to palaces and temple buildings. Surrounded by an exterior wall, the building complex was arranged along a central axis and was approached by an entrance gate and then a spirit gate. Behind them, in sequence, came a public hall and finally the private quarters. Each residential unit was built around a central court. This basic layout stencil applies throughout the Forbidden City.

The Forbidden City is the second section of the old imperial city of Beijing, running from DaMingMen (no longer existing, the starting-point of the palatial zone to the north of ZhengYangMen, through HuangCheng and GongCheng in the north to the peak of Jingshan Hill. The axis is 2,500 meters long and can be divided into three smaller sections, similar to a symphony of three movements - prelude, climax and coda.

The first is the longest, stretching from DaMingMen to WuMen in the front gate of GongCheng, consisting of three squares strung together in front of the Palace, serving as the leading space. The second is the Forbidden City itself, composed of the three parts of Qianchao (Outer Court), Houqin (Inner Court) and YuHuaYuan (imperial garden), which is the climax. The third is the shortest, stretching from ShenWuMen, the north gate of the Forbidden City, to WanChun Pavilion, the peak of jingshan.

So, there are three main sections, and each section has three subsections. Each part is different, but they are linked to and echo each other. They were accomplished in one grand design to serve the themes of creating a beautifully balanced whole and playing up the imperial authority.

The size of the two security houses under WuMen are purposefully reduced to set off the towering Wumen. The left and right of WuMen extend forward, thus expanding the level visual angle of scenery and enriching the overall pattern. The U-shaped plane has a very strong power of expression. As visitors get nearer to Wumen, the gigantic structures and expansive red city walls appear directly before them, giving an ever-stronger constrained and intense feeling.

It takes a long time for people to advance along the middle path of the long square, so this feeling is further intensified. In short, the designers have created a very powerful and heart-stirring atmosphere through a number of techniques to overwhelm the visitor and create the feeling of imperial grandeur that is sacred and inviolable.

All the squares in the area from DaMingMen to the Hall of Supreme Harmony (TaiHeDian) are paved and without flowers, grass or trees, to strengthen the serious keynote effect.

Behind TaiHeDian are the Hall of Complete Harmony (ZhongHeDian) and the Hall of Preserving Harmony (BaoHeDian), serving as a foil for TaiHeDian.

The three halls sit on a raised I-shaped white stone platform. The DaYueTai platform stands out in the front edge of the word "I". If the position is seen in a line with south at the top and north at the bottom, the platform is shaped like a cross ('+'). In line with the chinese five-element concept of gold, wood, water, fire and earth, the latter sits in the middle and is the most respectable.

HouQin, which uses the horizontal Gate of Heavenly Purity (QianQingMen) square as the lead, is a long courtyard. The front Palace of Heavenly Purity (QianQingGong) is the largest, and the rear Palace of Earthly Tranquility (KunNingGong) is smaller. Later, a square plane Hall of Heavenly and Earthly Intercourse (JiaoTaiDian) were added between the QianQing and KunNing palaces. The three halls are all located on a one-storied high I-shaped stone platform.

The scale of HouQin is smaller than the QianChao, but the design and architectural form are similar, making it seem like the reappearance of a symphonic theme.

The Imperial Garden is behind HouQin. Though it is called a garden, all the structures, paths, ponds and even flower beds and plants are regular and symmetrical, with only some localised variations, differing from the free pattern which is normally emphasized in chinese gardens. This is because it is a garden inside the strictly patterned and symmetrical imperial palace and is located on the primary axis, so that the local must be subordinated to the whole in order to maintain the complete style of the latter. However, ancient trees there tower to the skies with branches and leaves shading the ground, so that, after all, it is a place also full of the haphazardly beautiful delights of life.

Through a small square to the north of the Imperial Garden (YuHuaYuan), one finds ShenWuMen where there is a high tower. Passing through the north gate and across the city moat leads one to JingShan, the end of Forbidden City. Jingshan is high in the middle and low on both sides, in line with the encircling hill, on the ridge of which are five pavilions. As a fitting end to the magnificence derived from the axial line of the Forbidden City, obviously the size of JingShan cannot be too small. The structure, however, also cannot be too big, to avoid taking anything away from the grandeur of the structures inside the palace. To solve this, the designers created a big hill but built quite small pavilions on the top of the hill. Jingshan is the backdrop of the entire palatial city, thus enriching the horizontal line visible there.

WanChun Pavilion in the middle of JingShan is the largest. It is a square, three-layered eaved structure, with yellow as the main color; the two pavilions on each side are smaller, octagonal multi-eaved structures, chequered with yellow and green. The two outermost pavilions are the smallest, round, multi-eaved structures with green as the main color. Rich, rhythmic change is given to the volume, form and color, and atmospheric harmony is gained respectively with the solemn palace and the lively imperial garden.

The Forbidden city is the best example in the design of a complex of buildings in ancient chinese architecture. When expounding on the perfection of artistic works in his 'Study of Poetry', the ancient Greek esthetic Aristoteles said: "By perfection here I mean a thing with a beginning, middle and end. The beginning does not need any hypothetical thing before it, but there should be something following it. The end, on the contrary, must have certain assumed things before it, either necessity or probability, but it does not need anything to follow. The middle assumes certain things have taken place before it and something will follow it." According to Aristoteles, any artistic work must use the principle of the unity of multification, and each group of components must have characteristics conforming with their own identity, while the entirety should constitute an organic entity.

The design of various parts in the axial line of Beijing's palaces all conform with this principle. But it is far more complicated than the situation summed up by Aristoteles, demanding that artists develop a more careful observation capability and greater vigor to control the whole situation.

The Forbidden City enjoys a high reputation in the world. Discussing the Forbidden City in his famous work 'The Science and Civilization of China', Joseph Needham, a well-known british scholar, said: "We discover a series of separate spaces which are linked to each other ... They are contrary to palaces during the Renaissance in europe. In Versailles, for example, the visual point is completely concentrated in a single structure, and the palace is separate from the city. In contrast, the chinese concept is very profound and complicated, because there are hundreds of structures and the palace itself is only a greater whole".

Next : Getting to the Forbidden City