Ming Dynasty: The Forbidden City's Secrets

In 1406, the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty, the Yongle Emperor, made a decision that would reshape the cosmos. He was a usurper. He had taken the throne by force from his nephew in the southern capital of Nanjing. Now, he would build a new capital, a capital that would be a monument to his own undeniable and absolute power. He would move the center of the Chinese universe from the south back to his own northern power base, a city he called Beijing. And at the exact geometric center of this new city, he would build a new home. But it would not be a palace. It would be a city within a city, a vast walled enclosure of 980 buildings, 9,999 rooms, and a million ceremonies, all designed for one single purpose, to house one man, the son of heaven, and to keep the other 50 million people of his empire out. For the next 500 years, this place would be the most exclusive, most powerful, and most mysterious one square kilometer on Earth. This is the story of the Forbidden City. The project was an act of pure megalomaniacal will. To build his new capital, the Yongle Emperor mobilized a workforce that dwarfed the building of the pyramids. Over one million workers, including 100,000 of the finest artisans in the empire, were conscripted and sent north. The logistics were staggering. This was a project that would take 14 years, and the materials had to be the finest on Earth. The great support columns for the main halls required perfect, massive logs of Phoebe Gennan wood, a priceless, dense, and fragrant tree. These logs had to be harvested from the jungles of Sichuan, thousands of miles to the southwest, a process that cost the lives of so many men that it was said a single log was worth a single life. The floors of the great halls were paved with golden bricks, special paving blocks from Suzhou, which were fired for two years in a complex process, and then polished with tung oil until they shone with a deep, dark, metallic luster. From quarries miles away, million-pound blocks of marble were hewn for the great staircases. They were too heavy to move, so the engineers waited for winter. They dug wells every half-mile along the route, and when the temperature plunged, they flooded the road, creating a massive, artificial ice road. Thousands of men, in a slow, brutal, chanting procession, slid the massive stones over the ice all the way to the capital. This was not just a construction project. It was an act of human sacrifice. But the city's true secret is not its scale. It is its design. It is not just a palace. It is a cosmogram. It is a 3D walk-in map of the Chinese universe, a place designed to align the emperor with the heavens. The entire city is laid out on a perfect, eight-kilometer-long north-south axis, a dragon line that, in the imperial mind, was the central axis of the entire world. The emperor, when he sat on his dragon throne in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, was sitting at the exact center of this axis, the literal, physical center of the known universe. The symbolism was built into every single detail. The city is a box within a box within a box. The outer imperial city was surrounded by the new two, four-mile-long city wall of Beijing. Inside that was the Forbidden City itself, protected by a 170-foot-wide moat, the Golden Water River, and a three, three-foot-high red wall. This was the fortress, and its color, red, was the color of good fortune, of fire, of the south. The roofs were not red. They were, almost universally, yellow. Yellow was the color of the earth, the center in Chinese cosmology, and it was the color of the emperor. Only he, the son of heaven, could use this color. To wear it was a crime punishable by death. The numbers were just as deliberate. The palace, according to legend, has 9,999 rooms. In reality, it's about 9,000 bays, or spaces between columns. The number nine is the ultimate yang, or male number, the number of the emperor. You see it everywhere. The great ceremonial gates are studded with nine rows of nine golden knobs, and the entire city, this fortress of symbolism, was divided by a vast, empty courtyard into two distinct and separate worlds. This is the central secret of the Forbidden City. It is not one palace. It is two. The first was the outer court. This was the southern, male, yang half. This was the world of the state, the world of power. It was here, in three massive ceremonial halls, that the emperor ruled. He would sit on his throne in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the largest wooden building in all of China, to preside over his New Year's and coronation ceremonies. This was the public face of the emperor, a godlike, distant, and silent figure. But behind this outer court, through a gate called the Gate of Heavenly Purity, lay the second half of the palace. This was the inner court. This was the northern, female, yin half. This was the real Forbidden City, and this is the trap that the hook speaks of. This was the emperor's home, and by the inviolable law of the Ming Dynasty, no adult male was ever allowed to enter this inner court, ever, except for the emperor himself. It was a world of, by, and for women, but it was not a small world. At any given time, 20,000 people could be living inside the walls of the Forbidden City. The vast majority of them lived here, in the inner court. It was a prison of privilege, populated by three distinct groups, the empress, the concubines, and the eunuchs. The inner court was, in effect, a harem. The emperor was the only complete man, and he was served by an empress, a first wife, and a vast, shifting collection of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of concubines, concubines in training, and female servants. These women were, in many cases, prisoners. They were chosen at a young age, they entered the city, and they would never, ever be allowed to leave. They would live and die within these walls. Their entire existence was a desperate, two, four-hour-a-day, high-stakes competition for one single thing, the emperor's attention. If a concubine could catch his eye, if she could be chosen to spend the night with him, and, most critically, if she could bear him a son, she could rise in power from a simple servant to a noble consort, or even an empress dowager. This created a toxic, brutal, and often Game of Thrones-style world of backstabbing, of plots, of poisonings, and of alliances. And who ran this world? Who were the jailers, the messengers, the spies, the administrators, the only other men allowed to live there? The eunuchs. At its height, there were 10,000 eunuchs living in the Forbidden City. They were the castrated male servants who had given up their manhood to serve the throne. They were the shadow government. They ran the kitchens, they ran the gardens, they ran the imperial household department. They were the ones who managed the green-headed plaques, the system by which the emperor chose which concubine to sleep with. They were the ones who would wrap the chosen woman in a quilt, carry her naked to the emperor's bed, and then, most bizarrely, they would kneel at the foot of the bed, watching, and at a proscribed time, they would call out, it is time to end the encounter. They were the emperor's hands, his eyes, and his ears. And because they were, supposedly, without ambition, they could have no children, no dynasty of their own, they were, in theory, the emperor's most loyal servants. But in reality, as we saw with the fall of the Ming, they became the real power. They controlled who saw the emperor. They controlled what he read. They controlled the flow of information to the god in the center of the box. And in the end, they controlled the empire. The Forbidden City, designed by the Yongle Emperor to be the ultimate symbol of his personal power, was, in fact, a system designed to isolate him. It was a golden cage. The emperor was a prisoner, trapped in a yin world of 10,000 women and 10,000 eunuchs, all of them whispering, all of them plotting, all of them fighting for their sliver of his power. It was a perfect, self-contained, and deeply paranoid world. It was a machine. And when the last Ming emperor, Chongzhen, finally ran out of that city to hang himself on the hill behind it, he was not just fleeing an army of rebels. He was, at last, escaping the perfect prison his ancestors had built for him.