Forbidden City, also the Imperial Palace, remained the residence of the emperors for nearly five hundred years, from the 15th century to the early 20th century, and was the actual and symbolic seat of imperial power. Popularly known as the Forbidden City, it was built in the Ming Dynasty between the 4th and the 18th years of the Yongle period (1406 - 1420 AD). Designated by the State Council as one of China’s foremost protected monuments in 1961, the Forbidden City was also made a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987.
Situated at the heart of Beijing, the Forbidden City is approached through Tiananmen Gate. It is a location endowed with cosmic significance by ancient China’s astronomers. Correlating the emperor’s abode, which they considered the pivot of the terrestrial world, with the Pole Star (Ziweiyuan), which they believed to be at the center of the heavens, they called the palace The Purple Forbidden City. The 
Forbidden City was built from 1406 to 1420 by the third Ming emperor Yongle who, upon usurping the throne, determined to move his capital north from Nanjing to Beijing. In 1911 the Qing dynasty fell to the republican revolutionaries. The last emperor, Puyi, continued to live in the palace after his abdication until he was expelled in 1924. Twenty-four emperors lived and ruled from this palace during this 500-year span.
The Forbidden City is surrounded by 10-metre high walls and a 52-metre wide moat. Measuring 961 meters from north to south and 753 meters from east to west, it covers an area of 720,000 square meters. Each of the four sides is pierced by a gate, the Meridian Gate (Wu men) on the south and the Gate of Spiritual Valor Gate (Shenwu men) on the north being used as the entrance and exit by tourists today. Once inside, visitors will see a succession of halls and palaces spreading out on either side of an invisible central axis. It is a magnificent sight, the buildings’ glowing yellow roofs against vermilion walls, not to mention their painted ridges and carved beams, all contributing to the sumptuous effect.
Known as the Outer Court, the southern portion of the Forbidden City centers on the halls of Supreme Harmony, Central Harmony, and Preserving Harmony. These are flanked by the halls of Literary Glory and Military Eminence. It was here that the emperor held court and conducted his grand audiences.
Mirroring this arrangement is the Inner Court at the northern end of the Forbidden City, with the Palace of Heavenly Purity, the Hall of Union, and the Palace of Earthly Tranquility straddling the central axis, surrounded by the Six Palaces of the East and West and the Imperial Garden to the north. Other major buildings include the halls for Worshipping Ancestors and of Imperial Splendor on the east, and the Hall of Mental Cultivation, the Pavilion of the Rain of Flowers and the Palace of Benevolent Tranquility on the west. These contain not only the residences of the emperor and his empress, consorts and concubines but also the venues for religious rites and administrative activities.
In total, the buildings of the two courts account for an area of some 163,000 square meters. These were laid out precisely in accordance with a code of architectural hierarchy, which designated specific features to reflect the paramount authority and status of the emperor. No ordinary mortal would have been allowed or even dared to come within close proximity of these buildings.
After the republican revolution, this Palace as a whole would have been sequestered by the Nationalist government were it not for the “Articles of Favorable Treatment of the Qing House” which allowed Puyi to live on in the Inner Court after his abdication. Meanwhile, all of the imperial treasures from palaces in Rehe (today’s Chengde) and Mukden (today’s Shenyang) were moved to the Forbidden City for public display in History Museum established at the Outer Court in 1914. While confined to the Inner Court, Puyi continuously used such vestiges of influence as still remained to plot his own restoration. He also systematically stole or pawned a huge number of cultural relics under the pretext of granting them as rewards to his courtiers and minions or taking them out for repair.
In 1924, during a coup launched by the warlord Feng Yuxiang, Puyi was expelled from the Forbidden City and the management of the palace fell to the charge of a committee set up to deal with the concerns of the deposed imperial family. The committee began a sorting and counting of the imperial treasures. A year of intense preparations later, its members arranged a grand ceremony on 10 October 1925 in front of the Palace of Heavenly Purity to mark the inception of the Palace Museum. News of the opening flashed across the nation, and such was the scramble of visitors on the first day that traffic jams around Beijing brought the city almost to a standstill.
