Forbidden City

The Forbidden City is the walled palace complex at the centre of Beijing, built for the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty between 1406 and 1420. For almost five centuries it was the home of China's emperors and the seat of their government, housing 24 rulers of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Since 1925 it has housed the Palace Museum, one of the great collections of Chinese art.

The Yongle Emperor moved the Ming capital from Nanjing to Beijing and in 1406 began work on a new palace. Construction took fourteen years and is said to have employed more than a million workers. Whole trunks of precious nanmu wood were brought from the forests of south-western China, huge blocks of marble were cut from quarries near Beijing, and the floors of the main halls were laid with fine clay tiles from Suzhou known as golden bricks. The palace became the imperial seat in 1420.

The complex is a rectangle about 961 metres from north to south and 753 metres from east to west, covering 72 hectares. It is enclosed by a wall 7.9 metres high and a moat 52 metres wide. Its 980 surviving buildings contain some 8,886 bays, or room units; the popular claim that it has 9,999 rooms is folklore. It is divided into an Outer Court and an Inner Court. The grandest building, the Hall of Supreme Harmony, rises about 30 metres above its square and is the largest surviving wooden structure in China.

Fourteen Ming emperors ruled from the palace. In April 1644 rebels led by Li Zicheng captured it and he proclaimed a new Shun dynasty, but he soon fled before the forces of Wu Sangui and the Manchus, setting parts of the palace on fire as he went. In October of that year the young Shunzhi Emperor was proclaimed ruler of China in the palace, inaugurating the Qing dynasty. The Manchu rulers renamed several buildings with names stressing harmony, added Manchu inscriptions beside the Chinese ones, and added shamanist elements. Ten Qing emperors lived there in turn.

Foreign armies twice entered the palace. British and French troops occupied it in 1860 at the end of the Second Opium War, and in 1900, during the Boxer Rebellion, forces of the foreign powers held it until 1901 after Empress Dowager Cixi had fled the capital.

When the last emperor, Puyi, abdicated in 1912, the new Republic of China agreed to let him go on living in the Inner Court, and the Outer Court was opened to visitors. He was expelled in 1924 after a coup, and the following year the Palace Museum was established in the complex.

The Japanese invasion of the 1930s forced curators to evacuate the most valuable objects. In 1948, on the orders of Chiang Kai-shek, part of the collection was shipped to Taiwan. Of 13,491 crates evacuated, 2,972 are now held by the National Palace Museum in Taipei, over 8,000 went back to Beijing, and 2,221 remain in storage in Nanjing.

After 1949 some damage was done, and several schemes to demolish or repurpose the palace were put forward, including making it the seat of the new government. In 1961 it was placed on China's first list of nationally protected sites. During the Cultural Revolution an army battalion dispatched by Premier Zhou Enlai stood guard over it, sparing it further destruction.

UNESCO inscribed the palace as a World Heritage Site in 1987; in 2004 the listing was extended to include the Mukden Palace in Shenyang, and in 2024 the Forbidden City also became part of the Beijing Central Axis listing. A long restoration programme begun in the early 2000s aimed to return buildings to their condition before 1911 and to open most of the complex to visitors. The museum's collection, built on the Qing imperial holdings, numbers more than 1.8 million objects. Visitor numbers have averaged around 14 million a year since 2012 and exceeded 19 million in 2019.