The Forbidden City in Beijing: who built it, why it was forbidden, what is inside its 980 buildings, and how to visit

Architecture · 4 September 2026

The Forbidden City is the palace of the Ming and Qing emperors in the centre of Beijing, built between 1406 and 1420 by the Yongle Emperor when he moved the capital from Nanjing, and home to 24 emperors until the last, Puyi, was expelled in 1924. It is the largest palace complex in the world, 961 m long and 753 m wide, 72 hectares inside a moat and a 10 m wall, with 980 surviving buildings on a single north–south axis; it was "forbidden" because no one could enter or leave without the emperor's permission, and the ordinary people of Beijing never saw inside it until it became the Palace Museum in 1925. Below: who built it and how, why it was forbidden, the plan and the main halls, who lived there and how, the numbers and the myths, and how to visit, with the emperors' other buildings, the Temple of Heaven among them, in the Ancient temples of the world collection.

Who built it and how

Zhu Di, the Yongle Emperor, was a son of the Ming founder who had been given the north as Prince of Yan, with his seat at the old Mongol capital of Dadu, today's Beijing; in 1402 he took the throne from his nephew in a civil war, and in 1406 ordered a new capital built on his own ground, on the site of Kublai Khan's palace, which had been razed. Work began with the gathering of materials and the actual construction took from 1417 to 1420, with a workforce the Ming records put at a million labourers and 100,000 craftsmen. Timber for the great columns was the nanmu of the forests of Sichuan, Hunan and Guizhou, felled and floated down rivers and the Grand Canal for up to four years, with such loss of life that the saying was "a thousand go into the mountains, five hundred come out"; the marble came from quarries at Fangshan 70 km away, and the largest stone, the 300-ton carved dragon ramp behind the Hall of Preserving Harmony, was dragged in winter over a road of ice, watered from wells dug every half-kilometre, by 20,000 men in 28 days. The bricks of the floors, the "golden bricks" of Suzhou, took a year each to make and were polished with tung oil; the roof tiles are glazed yellow, the imperial colour, from the kilns of the capital. The chief architect is recorded as Kuai Xiang, a carpenter from Suzhou, working with the eunuch Nguyen An, a Vietnamese captive, and the engineers of the Ministry of Works. The palace was finished in 1420 and burned in 1421; it was rebuilt, and the halls burned and were rebuilt repeatedly, so that most of what stands is Qing work of the 17th and 18th centuries on the Ming plan. Forbidden City.

Why "forbidden"

The Chinese name is Zijincheng, the "Purple Forbidden City": purple for the pole star, around which the heavens turn, as the empire turned around the emperor, and forbidden because the palace was the emperor's private domain, entered only by the imperial family, its concubines, eunuchs, guards and, by summons, officials, and left only with permission. Common people were barred on pain of death; foreign ambassadors got as far as the outer court. Inside, the rules went further: only the emperor might use the central path of the gates and the ramps carved with dragons, only he might wear yellow, and the men of the inner court, apart from him, were the eunuchs, several thousand of them, so that no child born in the palace could be anyone's but his. The city was one of a set of nested walls: the Forbidden City inside the Imperial City, inside the Inner City, inside the Outer City, each with gates that closed at night.

The plan: from the Meridian Gate to the garden

• The Meridian Gate (Wumen). The southern entrance, a U-shaped tower where the emperor reviewed the army and announced the calendar; the central of its five arches was the emperor's, with one exception, the top graduate of the civil service examination, who walked through it once.
• The Golden Water River. A bow-shaped canal crossed by five marble bridges, one for each Confucian virtue.
• The Gate of Supreme Harmony and the Outer Court. Three great halls on a three-tier marble terrace, the public part of the palace: the Hall of Supreme Harmony (Taihedian), the largest wooden building in China, 35 m high on 72 columns, where emperors were enthroned and married and received the court at New Year; the small Hall of Central Harmony, where the emperor rested and rehearsed; and the Hall of Preserving Harmony, for banquets and, from 1789, the final examination for the civil service.
• The Gate of Heavenly Purity and the Inner Court. The private half, mirroring the outer court in miniature: the Palace of Heavenly Purity (Qianqinggong), the emperor's residence and, from the Qing, his office, with the tablet behind the throne where the name of the heir was hidden; the Hall of Union, where the empress received the court and the imperial seals were kept; and the Palace of Earthly Tranquillity, the empress's palace, used by the Qing for shamanic rites and the wedding night.
• The six eastern and six western palaces. Courtyards for the consorts and concubines, ranked by distance from the emperor; the Hall of Mental Cultivation on the west, where the Qing emperors from Yongzheng actually lived and where the Dowager Cixi ruled from behind a screen.
• The Imperial Garden. At the north end, 12,000 square metres of pavilions, ancient cypresses and rockeries, the only garden in a palace that is otherwise stone courtyards; then the Gate of Divine Might and the moat, with Jingshan, the artificial hill of the excavated earth, beyond it, from which the last Ming emperor hanged himself in 1644.

The whole is laid out by the geomancy of the capital: the axis runs from the Temple of Heaven in the south through the Meridian Gate, the throne halls and the garden to the Drum and Bell Towers in the north, and the palace faces south, its back to the cold and the steppe.

Who lived there

Fourteen Ming emperors from 1420 and ten Qing from 1644, when the Manchus took Beijing, kept the palace and its rituals and changed the names of the halls. With them lived the empress, the consorts and concubines, up to several hundred, their children, and a staff of eunuchs, 70,000 at the height of the Ming and about 3,000 under the Qing, together with maidservants recruited at thirteen and released at twenty-five. The eunuchs ran the household, the treasury, the kitchens and, at intervals, the state; the Ming dynasty's collapse is blamed on them. The Qing emperors worked from dawn, in the Hall of Mental Cultivation, reading memorials with the vermilion brush; the Qianlong Emperor, who reigned sixty years and filled the palace with his collection, built a retirement palace in the north-east corner with a garden and an opera stage. The Empress Dowager Cixi ruled through two child emperors from 1861 to 1908, and the last emperor, Puyi, enthroned at two in 1908, abdicated in 1912 and was allowed to keep the Inner Court with his court and eunuchs until the warlord Feng Yuxiang expelled him in 1924; the Palace Museum opened the next year. The collection of a million objects was crated and moved south ahead of the Japanese in 1933 and the best of it went to Taiwan in 1949, where it is the National Palace Museum in Taipei.

The numbers and the building

• Size. 72 hectares, 961 by 753 m; the moat 52 m wide and 6 m deep; the wall 10 m high and 8.6 m thick at the base, with a corner tower at each corner of 9 beams, 18 pillars and 72 ridges.
• Buildings. 980 surviving, with 8,886 rooms by the modern count; 9,999 and a half by legend, one fewer than the 10,000 of heaven.
• Construction. Timber-frame halls on stone terraces, with brackets (dougong) carrying the wide eaves, no nails in the joinery, walls that carry no load, and a flexibility that has survived six centuries of earthquakes; painted in the imperial scheme of red walls, yellow tiles, white marble and green-and-blue brackets.
• Roof figures. The rank of a hall is read from the line of glazed beasts on the ridge: the Hall of Supreme Harmony has ten, the only building in China allowed that many.
• Fires. The palace burned in 1421, 1557, 1597, 1644 and 1679; 308 bronze and iron vats stood full of water, heated in winter with charcoal, as fire engines.
• Visitors. Around 17 million a year before 2020, capped at 80,000 a day, the most visited museum in the world.

The tradition of the timber hall, from the Tang Foguang Temple to Beijing, is explained in Japanese architecture, which inherited it; the Ming who built the palace also rebuilt the Great Wall.

Visiting

The Palace Museum is entered from the south through the Meridian Gate, after Tiananmen Square, and left through the north gate to Jingshan; there is no way back, and the walk along the axis is about 2 km, with the side palaces and the Treasure Gallery in the north-east adding more. Tickets are sold online only, by passport number, up to seven days ahead, and the daily 80,000 sell out in holidays; it is closed on Mondays. Three to four hours is a normal visit; Jingshan hill after, at the north gate, gives the view down over the yellow roofs that is the best picture of the palace. The Hall of Supreme Harmony is seen from its doorway; the Hall of Mental Cultivation, the clocks gallery and the Treasure Gallery are the most rewarding interiors. Beijing's other imperial sites, the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace and the Ming Tombs, each take half a day.

Versions and theories

• 9,999 rooms. The legend says the Jade Emperor's palace in heaven had 10,000 and the earthly one had to have fewer; the count of 8,886 "rooms" is of bays between columns, not rooms as we mean them. The number is a story, the principle real.
• No trees in the outer court. True, and explained variously: to give assassins no cover, to keep the emperor's view of heaven clear, or because trees would have turned the character for "trapped" if planted in the courtyard's square. The garden at the north is the exception.
• The ice road. Recorded in Ming documents and confirmed by an engineering study in 2013: the wells every 500 m, the winter timing, and the sledges on wet ice; a 300-ton stone needed 46 men per ton on ice against many more on rollers.
• Ghosts of the concubines. The palace is Beijing's favourite haunted site, with a tradition of women in white in the western palaces; the museum closes at five and does not comment.
• Puyi's treasures. The last emperor and his brother smuggled hundreds of paintings and calligraphies out in 1922–24 "as gifts"; some were recovered from Manchuria after 1945, some are lost, some surface at auction.
• The Hall of Supreme Harmony was never used for daily business. Correct: the great hall was for ceremonies a few times a year, and the emperors governed from small rooms in the inner court, which is why the Hall of Mental Cultivation, a modest building, is where history happened.

Open the sections: ancient temples of the world, buildings by style, all articles.