Beijing, China
故宫 · Gùgōng
The Ming and Qing palace, finished in 1420. World Heritage since 1987.
Photo: Güldem Üstün, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are standing in the largest group of timber palace buildings left in the world. In 1420 the Yongle emperor moved his capital to Beijing, and this palace was finished the same year. For more than 500 years, 24 Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) emperors held court and lived here.
The palace measures 961 m from south to north and 753 m from east to west, larger than a hundred football pitches. In 1925, a year after the last emperor Puyi was moved out, it became the Palace Museum: the forbidden city turned into a place anyone can walk into.
One ticket takes you through the whole palace from south to north: the three great halls, the emperor's and empress's palaces behind them, the side palaces where the consorts lived, the Imperial Garden and the regular galleries. Two galleries inside need a small extra ticket, and two famous views are outside the walls.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The Meridian Gate, the only way in | Included |
| The Outer Court: the three great halls | Included |
| The Inner Court: the three rear palaces | Included |
| The Six Eastern and Six Western Palaces | Included |
| The Imperial Garden | Included |
| The Treasure Gallery | 10 yuan extra |
| The Gallery of Clocks | 10 yuan extra |
| The corner towers | Seen from outside, by the moat. No ticket |
| Jingshan, the hill with the view of the whole palace | A separate park north of the palace, with its own ticket |
Look up at the hall in front of you. It is the largest and highest-ranking building in the palace, used for enthronements, imperial weddings and the New Year audience. It is eleven bays wide and five deep, and with its terrace stands more than 35 m high.
It has had three names and has burned several times. Nine months after it was first finished, lightning set it on fire. The hall you see was rebuilt in 1695 under the Kangxi emperor.
Now count the small figures along the corner of the roof. An immortal riding a phoenix leads, with ten beasts behind. Other halls have nine at most. Only this one has the tenth, called Hangshi, and it is found nowhere else in China.
For five centuries almost nobody was allowed to stand where you are standing. These are some who did.
Walk the central axis from south to north. The front half is the Outer Court, where the emperor worked. Past the Gate of Heavenly Purity is the Inner Court, where the family lived. The Chinese phrase for this is “court in front, bedchambers behind”.
In plan the gate is a U. Two wings reach forward from the main tower, each with two pavilions, making five towers in all, which is why it is also called the Five Phoenix Towers.
The central opening was for the emperor alone, with two exceptions: an empress entered through it once, on her wedding day, and the top three graduates of the palace examination left through it once. Princes used the west opening and officials the east.
“Take him out of the Meridian Gate and behead him” is a line from the opera stage. What happened outside this gate in Ming times was the court beating, in which officials were flogged in public. The execution grounds were elsewhere in the city.
Three names: Fengtian Hall under Yongle, Huangji Hall from 1562, and Taihe, Supreme Harmony, from 1645.
It burned nine months after completion and again under the Jiajing, Wanli and Kangxi emperors. When the Shunzhi emperor took the throne the hall was still a ruin, and the ceremony was held at the gate in front of it.
The roof is a double-eaved hip roof, the highest grade in Chinese building. Inside stand 72 great timber columns.
The roof figures: behind the immortal on the phoenix come a dragon, a phoenix, a lion, and seven more beasts ending with Hangshi. Accounts differ on the order of the middle ones.
Zhou Qian, a researcher at the Palace Museum, reads the immortal on the phoenix as a fire charm: the phoenix stands for the fire god Zhurong. A hall that burned again and again has a roof lined with creatures meant to put fires out.
This is the largest stone carving in the palace: a single block of white marble from Fangshan, 16.57 m long, 3.07 m wide and 1.7 m thick, carved with nine dragons.
It was moved in winter. Wells were dug along the road, water was poured out to freeze into an ice track, and mules and men dragged the block into Beijing. Its weight is given as 200 tonnes in one account and 250 in another.
Above the throne hangs a tablet in the Shunzhi emperor's hand: “upright and bright”.
After the bitter succession struggle among Kangxi's sons, the Yongzheng emperor stopped naming an heir in public. He wrote the name twice, kept one copy on his person and sealed the other in a box placed behind this tablet. After his death the two were compared and the new emperor took the throne.
From Yongzheng on, emperors slept in the Hall of Mental Cultivation instead, and this palace became a place for business and banquets. The abdication edict of 1912 was issued here.
The hall held the 25 seals with which a Qing emperor exercised power. The Qianlong emperor fixed the number in 1746 from a line in the Book of Changes, hoping the dynasty would last 25 reigns. It had twelve emperors.
On the east side stands a bronze water clock and on the west a large chiming clock made in 1798: old timekeeping and mechanical clockwork face to face.
In Ming times this was the empress's residence. The Qing rebuilt it to Manchu custom as a place of sacrifice, with heated brick platforms around three sides and great pots for boiling the offering meat.
The unusual thing: the emperor's seat is not in the centre and does not face south. It sits under the south window facing north. In this room the rules of a Chinese palace, symmetry, centre and south, do not apply.
Each corner of the palace wall carries a tower with one storey and three tiers of eaves.
Two wonders in one year. The palace was finished in the winter of 1420; on 7 August that year work began on the dome of Florence Cathedral, designed by Brunelleschi. One is the largest timber palace in the world, the other still the largest brick dome.
At New Year 1421 the Yongle emperor received his officials and foreign envoys in the new hall. The same year Zheng He set out on his sixth voyage. The claim in Gavin Menzies' book 1421 that this fleet reached America before Columbus is not accepted by historians.
Another palace inside red walls. The red brick walls of the Moscow Kremlin were built in 1485–1495 by Italian architects for Ivan III, 65 years after the Forbidden City.
The palace has a father and brothers. The first Ming emperor built palaces at Fengyang and Nanjing; Beijing followed the Nanjing plan “but taller and grander”. The Qing built another at Shenyang before taking Beijing, and since 2004 the two are listed together as World Heritage.
In 2024 the palace was listed a second time, as the core of the Beijing Central Axis.
The Last Emperor (1987, Bernardo Bertolucci) was the first Western feature film allowed to shoot inside the palace. It won all nine Oscars it was nominated for, and Ryuichi Sakamoto became the first Asian composer to win for best original score.
Puccini's opera Turandot is set in an imagined Beijing palace. The princess's theme is the Chinese folk song Jasmine Flower, which Puccini heard from a music box. The famous 1998 “Forbidden City” production was in fact staged just outside it, at the Imperial Ancestral Temple.
Masters in the Forbidden City (2016), a three-part documentary about the museum's restorers of clocks, bronzes and paintings, sent many young people to apply for jobs here.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
People say each corner tower has “nine beams, eighteen columns and seventy-two ridges”, and that the carpenter god Lu Ban showed the builders how to make it by handing them a cricket cage. Counts of the actual parts do not agree with the saying.
Source: Beijing folk tale
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-11. Travel and news reports, not the site's own notices.
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