The Forbidden City was completed in 1420; in 2020 it turned six hundred. Inside the red walls was dynasty; outside was the world.
What moves you about the Forbidden City is not the treasures it keeps, but the joys and sorrows it witnessed.
In the eighteenth year of Yongle (1420), the Forbidden City was finished. A hundred thousand craftsmen and over a million labourers spent fourteen years bringing a million namu logs from the deep mountains of Yunnan and Guizhou to Beijing. On the day Zhu Di moved the capital, no one could have guessed that this city would become the centre of Chinese politics for five hundred years — and the largest wooden architectural complex in the world today.
On the square before the Hall of Supreme Harmony, officials once hailed the emperor ten thousand times; in the warm rooms of the Hall of Mental Cultivation, emperors reviewed memorials late into the night. Grand weddings in Kunning Palace, deathbed edicts in Qianqing Palace, swings in the Imperial Garden — power, love, illness and loneliness all truly happened within the red walls. Six hundred years of the Forbidden City is a condensed history of the Chinese court.
In 1925, the Forbidden City became the Palace Museum; the plaque went up at the Gate of Divine Might, and a place once reserved for emperors opened to everyone. In 2015, when the museum held its Shiqu Baoji exhibition, people queued into the night to see Along the River During the Qingming Festival. The Forbidden City is no longer a sealed past; it has become an open cultural site.
At dusk by the corner tower, photographers wait for the last light. Six hundred years ago, someone inside the walls may have been waiting for a letter from home; six hundred years later, we wait for a good photograph. The wall is still the same wall, but at last the people on either side of it can see each other. That may be the best possible ending for the Forbidden City.
