The Forbidden City

At the heart of Beijing lies the great walled palace compound of the Forbidden City: the palace, its mystique and its history have played a huge role in defining China and its perceptions. This book offers an amazing portrait of that storied collection of buildings which enables us to understand the life of imperial China.It was built by a Ming Emperor in our fifteenth century - to be a terrestrial reflection of the celestial realm of the Jade Emperor. Destroyed and rebuilt on an even more splendid scale by the final ManchuQuing Emperors, it consists of a series of courtyards approached by gates (chief among them Tianan Men) and an imperial way. This book brilliantly reconstructs the life that went on in those ancestral temples, lacquered chambers and vermilion halls both in the imperial heyday and in the decadent decline under the Dowager Empress. Fifty years ago Mao considered razing all to the ground. Now it is a Wonder of the World.