The Forbidden City once is the residence of 24 Chinese emperors.
< span style="FONT-FAMILY:Tahoma;FONT-SIZE:10pt">Panorama inside the Forbidden City in Beijing, China.
The Forbidden City is located in the center of China’s capital Beijing. Construction began in 1406 and it took 14 years for it to be completed. From 1420 to 1911 this was the center of power of the Chinese imperial court. In addition to the rooms and palaces used for political discussions, the Forbidden City also served as accommodation for Chinese emperors and their families. A total of 24 emperors lived here, 14 emperors of the Ming Dynasty and the remaining 10 emperors of the Qing Dynasty.
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< br>Interior diagram of the Forbidden City with more than 10 thousand rooms on an area of 74 hectares.
< br>The Forbidden City as depicted in a Ming Dynasty painting.
The reason this place is called the Forbidden City is because outsiders are not allowed to enter here. With an area of 74 hectares, it is larger than the Vatican. Inside the citadel, it is estimated that there are more than 10 thousand different rooms. The wall is more than 8m thick and 6m high and completely encloses the interior. Basically, it takes a lot of materials to build the Forbidden City. Like many ancient structures, the construction process of this citadel has been a mystery for hundreds of years.
The problem is not the huge size of the citadel. The citadel is the use of very large and heavy materials to build that citadel. On average, a block of stone weighs more than 300 tons, so how could the ancient Chinese transport such blocks over a distance of about 70 meters from outside the city?
< div>This has been a challenging question for historians for many years about how they transported such construction materials over quite long distances. Many hypotheses have been proposed but no solution seems realistic. Means of transportation at that time, such as horse-drawn carriages, could not do this.
