History
After the Manchu dynasty fell in 1911, the Forbidden City began to fall into disrepair, exacerbated by heavy looting of artefacts and jewels by the Japanese in the 1930s and again by the Nationalists, prior to their flight to Taiwan, in 1949. A programme of restoration has been under way for decades, and today the complex is in better shape than it has been for most of this century, in the interests of more than two million visitors a year. It's big enough to fill several separate visits, and its elegance on such a massive scale is extraordinary. The complex, with its maze of eight hundred buildings and reputed nine thousand chambers, was the symbolic and literal heart of the capital, and of the empire too. From within, the emperors , the Sons of Heaven, issued commands with absolute authority to their millions of subjects. Very rarely did they emerge - perhaps with good reason. Their lives, right down to the fall of the Manchu in this century, were governed by an extraordinarily developed taste for luxury and excess. It is estimated that a single meal for a Qing emperor could have fed several thousand of his impoverished peasants, a scale obviously appreciated by the last influential Manchu, the Empress Dowager Cixi, who herself would commonly order preparation of one hundred or more dishes. Sex, too, provided startling statistics, with Ming-dynasty harems numbering only just below five figures. Although the earliest structures on the Forbidden City site began with Kublai Khan during the Mongol dynasty, the plan (and originals) of the Imperial Palace buildings are essentially Ming. Most date to the fifteenth century and the ambitions of the Emperor Yongle, the monarch responsible for switching the capital back to Beijing in 1403. His building programme was concentrated between 1407 and 1420, involving up to a hundred artisans and perhaps a million labourers. The halls were laid out according to geomantic theories - in accordance to the yin and yang, the balance of negative and positive - and since they stood at the exact centre of Beijing, and Beijing was considered the centre of the universe, the harmony was supreme. The palace complex constantly reiterates such references, alongside personal symbols of imperial power such as the dragon and phoenix (emperor and empress) and the crane and turtle (longevity of reign).
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