The Forbidden City - Essay Example

A city, which is now Beijing, was a significant commercial center in the beginning of the ninth century BC. It became the administrative core of the principality of the Yan and eventually became the capital of Liao and later on the Jin. The northern tribe, the Tartars, constructed a city near this site in the tenth century.ii When the Venetian explorer Marco Polo visited the location, he illustrated it as the city of Khan, with fortified roofs highlighting the green flora of mulberry trees. Modern Beijing is roughly five centuries old, with several of its prominent edifices entirely restored.

When Yung-lo instituted Beijing as his Chinese capital in the early fifteenth century, he commissioned roughly 200,000 laborers to construct the imperial city. Hsu Tai, Feng Chiao and Yuan An, his three engineers, were provided with the direction to build a massive, affluent and mystifying palace to function as the metropolis of the Emperor to the rest of the world. The role of the Emperor was a difficult one. Auditoriums were required for receiving delegations, along with places of worship for sacramental cleansing and processional paths.

He as well demanded expansive domestic residences with backyards for himself and his loved ones in addition to administrative housing.iii The Forbidden City was entangled in ceremonial and spiritual notions. Legend tells that the core structure of the City was envisioned in a reverie by the mentor of Yung-lo, a futurist monk. He envisioned a celestial city, wherein the Lord of Heaven dwelled in a purple enclosed space, which is assumed to be a constellation shaped by 15 heavenly bodies revolving around the polestar.

iv As Chinese cosmology believes, purple was an embodiment of bliss and happiness and as well as that of the polestar. Hence, the Emperor proclaimed himself as the Son of Heaven, with the divine obligation