The Forbidden City: How a Million Workers Built the World's Largest Surviving Palace in 14 Years

The Forbidden City is the imperial palace at the centre of Beijing: 72 hectares inside a wall 7.9 metres high and a moat 52 metres wide, 961 metres from north to south and 753 metres from east to west. It holds 980 surviving buildings. It is the largest surviving palace complex in the world. 12

The Yongle Emperor moved the Ming capital to Beijing and built it between 1406 and 1420. The work took 14 years and more than a million workers: over 100,000 skilled artisans and up to a million labourers. Nearly the first decade of that went on gathering materials, and the halls went up in the last three years, from 1417 to 1420. 134

The pillars of the most important halls were whole logs of nanmu, Phoebe zhennan, a timber from the jungles of south-western China. The forests of the Western Hills had been cut out long before, so the large timber came by water: logs floated on the Grand Canal from the upper reaches of the Yangtze, some of them taking four years to reach Beijing. The feat was never repeated; the great pillars standing today were rebuilt from pieces of pine in the Qing dynasty. 1234

The floors of the main halls were paved with "golden bricks", jinzhuan, made not in Beijing but near Suzhou. The clay came from Lumu, north of Suzhou, a yellow soil suited to brick. The blocks went through more than 20 steps, from ageing the mud to firing and grinding, and a batch took about half a year from the first spadeful to the open kiln. The bricks are named for the sound rather than the colour: struck, a good one rings like metal. Much of the paving in the palace is still the six-century-old original. 135

The stone came from quarries near Beijing, but the largest pieces could not be carted. The Large Stone Carving behind the Hall of Preserving Harmony is one block 16.57 metres long, 3.07 metres wide and 1.7 metres thick, about 200 tons today and roughly 300 tons before it was re-cut in 1761. The quarry was 70 kilometres away. Workers dug wells along the route and poured water on the ground in deep winter to make an ice track, then dragged the block on a sledge. The account on the palace signs is 20,000 men over 28 days; a 2013 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calculated that on water-lubricated ice about 100 men could have pulled it, at roughly 8 centimetres a second. 136

Almost every roof carries yellow glazed tile, because yellow was the emperor's colour. Under them, the Hall of Supreme Harmony rises about 30 metres above the square, nine bays wide and five deep, and is the largest surviving wooden structure in China. 1

The finished palace barely had time to be admired. Scarcely nine months after the three main halls were completed they burned down, the throne room among them, and 23 years passed before they were rebuilt. The halls standing today are later work. The bricks underfoot are not. 3