Forbidden City
Site View and Location
Forbidden City
China
Longitude: 116.3974
Latitude: 39.9163
Historical Significance
The Forbidden City is the world's largest and best-preserved imperial palace complex, recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987 and a defining monument of Chinese civilisation, imperial ideology, and classical architecture. Its rigid layout — oriented to mirror cosmic order, with the emperor at the literal centre of the universe — reflects a political philosophy that governed one of history's most powerful empires for half a millennium. The site holds an incomparable collection of over 1.8 million imperial artefacts, making it one of the most significant repositories of Chinese cultural heritage on the planet.
Facts
Fact 1
A City of 9,999 Rooms
Imperial tradition held that heaven had 10,000 rooms, so the Forbidden City was built with 9,999.5 rooms to remain humbly below the divine — though modern surveys count approximately 8,728 actual rooms.
Fact 2
Built by a Million Workers
Construction required an estimated one million labourers and 100,000 artisans over 14 years, with materials sourced from across China including massive timber beams floated down rivers from Sichuan and Yunnan provinces.
Fact 3
The Last Emperor
Puyi, the last emperor of China, was enthroned in the Forbidden City at age two in 1908 and expelled by the new Republic in 1924 — he later returned as a Japanese puppet ruler of Manchukuo before ending his days as an ordinary citizen gardener.
Fact 4
Earthquake-Resistant Design
The palace's traditional wooden post-and-beam construction, using mortise-and-tenon joints with no nails, makes the buildings highly flexible during earthquakes — the complex has survived numerous major seismic events largely intact over 600 years.
Fact 5
A Sea of Golden Rooftiles
The palace's characteristic yellow glazed roof tiles were reserved exclusively for the emperor by imperial decree; secondary buildings use green tiles, and only the Library of Literary Profundity uses black tiles, symbolising water as a fireproofing measure.
Fact 6
Evacuated Treasures
During the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Palace Museum secretly transported nearly 20,000 crates of irreplaceable artefacts across China to protect them; when the Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan in 1949, roughly 700,000 objects went with them and now form the core of Taipei's National Palace Museum.