Note sull'episodio
In 1406 the Yongle emperor of the Ming dynasty moved China's capital from Nanjing to Beijing and ordered a new palace that took 14 years and more than a million workers to build. Its name, the Purple Forbidden City, tied the emperor's home to the North Star, the Ziwei Star, seat of the Jade Emperor. Builders dragged Phoebe zhennan logs out of malaria-ridden jungles in southwestern China and paved the halls with golden bricks from Suzhou, fired for over 130 days and soaked in tung oil until they rang like metal. Behind an eight meter wall, a 52 meter moat, and the Meridian Gate, only the emperor could walk the Imperial Way to the Hall of Supreme Harmony, nine bays wide and five deep.
Life in the inner court followed yin and yang, trigrams from the I Ching, and a rigid ranking of consorts in the six Eastern and six Western palaces. The Yongzheng emperor, out of respect for the Kangxi emperor, moved his bedroom to the smaller Hall of Mental Cultivation, which ran the empire for two centuries. After 24 emperors, Puyi abdicated in 1912 but kept living in the inner court until a 1924 coup; the Palace Museum opened in 1925. In 1933 curators fled the Japanese advance with thousands of crates, and the collection ended up split between Beijing, Nanjing, and Taipei. During the Cultural Revolution, Zhou Enlai sent a battalion to guard the gates, and in 2019 some 19 million people walked through them.
- The myth of 9,999 rooms versus the surveyed count of 8,886 bays, each defined by four wooden pillars
- A 200-ton carved marble ramp slid to the palace in winter over roads flooded from wells to form ice
- The mirror hung above the throne, said to fall and crush any illegitimate usurper who sat beneath it
- Black roof tiles on the library to invoke water against fire, and green tiles for the crown prince's youth
- More than a thousand jeweled clocks, many from Britain, and a full-size replica built at Hengdian World Studios