The Forbidden City

Run the subtractive test along the axis. The moat and the wall cannot go: the palace is defined by exclusion, and its name says so. The Meridian Gate, the Gate of Supreme Harmony and the Gate of Heavenly Purity cannot go, because each is a degree of access, and access is what the plan grades. The three halls cannot go, nor the one terrace that lifts the ritual of the state above everyone else’s ground. The division of Outer and Inner Court is compelled by the rule that the court stands in front and the residence behind. Structure compels as much: the timber frame on the bay module sets every hall’s proportion. What resists is repetition. The Six Eastern and Six Western Palaces and the ranks of side halls and storerooms could be thinned without loss of argument.

Score: 8.8 / 10

What the palace brings into the open is a way of power that can be stated: in this state rule is made by distance, and rank is a measure of how far in one may go. The plan states it without a word. One gate admits many, the next fewer, and the central opening of the Meridian Gate admits one man. The great court holds the official order in ranks before a hall almost none will enter, and behind it the household stands on the state’s own axis, so that succession and government are one line. The disclosure reaches past its makers’ intention: the deeper the court, the closer the real power, and the Qing ruled from small rooms within it. What holds the axis here is that the plan is the power’s self-image. The labour that served it lives at its margins, unstated.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Elevation recurs along the axis, and it is the building’s method: the Meridian Gate from its forecourt, walls rising on three sides and five pavilions above, built to make the one who approaches small; the deep central passage, and the light beyond it, with the Golden Water River bowed across the court; the great court, an emptiness of stone, and the hall above it on three tiers of marble; the throne seen through the open doors in the dark of the hall; and from the northern wall the yellow roofs, one law to the horizon. Grandeur is horizontal: expanse, repetition and withheld height. Held below the top because the elevation is concentrated on the axis and in one register. The halls are not high, the interiors are dim, and the Inner Court by design does not rise.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Archetype is built into plan. The name states it: zi, purple, is the enclosure of the heavens round the pole, and the Son of Heaven dwells in its earthly counterpart. The Analects’ ruler, like the pole star “which keeps its place while all the stars turn toward it”, is made a plan. The throne stands on the axis; the halls face south, the quarter in which the ruler faces his subjects. In the Inner Court heaven and earth are built as the emperor’s and the empress’s palaces, with the hall of their union between. Remove the myth and the plan has no reason for its axis, its orientation or its centre. Held below the top because the cosmogram is the type’s, inherited from the canonical capital plans and the palaces before it, and a plan is read in procession, not seen as one image.

Score: 9.3 / 10

The inheritance is two thousand years of the Chinese palace: the ideal capital of the ritual classics, the palace cities of Chang’an and Kaifeng, the Yuan palace on this site, and the Ming founder’s palaces at Fengyang and Nanjing; the official timber manner had been codified since the Song. The departures are of degree: a scale beyond the Nanjing palace; a whole palace city planned at once and built in fourteen years; and the palace fixed at the centre of a capital laid on one axis. Its makers sought orthodoxy, not departure. The stake was enormous, a capital moved to the frontier at a cost in treasure and lives, but it was political, not formal. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the form itself risked nothing.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Substitute another form and what the palace knows goes with it. Power here is lived as passage: through a sequence of gates, each closing the view behind it and opening a larger emptiness ahead, to a throne raised on three tiers of marble. The great audience is a form before it is a ceremony. Officials take their places by rank on the paving of the court, and the space is the order of the state, made visible to those who stand in it. The Gate of Heavenly Purity makes the threshold between government and household a building, and the lanes of the Inner Court make the life within them one of enclosure. Held below the top because the form compelled so totally that life fled it: the Qing emperors moved their daily residence into a smaller hall, and their summers outside the city.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Evidence over promise. The palace was closed to all but the court for five centuries, so sustained critical return is about a century old, but it has come from many sides. Architectural: from the 1930s scholars built the history of Chinese building on its measured fabric. Cosmological and ritual: readings of its numbers, colours, names and orientation, some sound and some, like its 9,999 rooms, legend. Political: the palace as the model of the imperial state, reread by the Republic and the People’s Republic. The museum: how a household becomes a nation’s, and what is lost when it is made a display. The household: the Inner Court as a world of women and eunuchs, recovered from its archives. Held below the top because the span of open study is short, and much of it concerns dating and use rather than meaning.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Standing for six centuries, so force and reach are scored together, in the palace’s own tradition and region, Chinese and East Asian palace and official building. The intrinsic force is that of the definitive and surviving statement of the Chinese imperial palace; but the reorganisation it represents was largely made in the plans it followed, and the palace at Nanjing is lost rather than surpassed in idea. Held below the top because the type it perfected ended with the empire in 1912. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Qing took the palace over whole rather than build anew, and governed from it for 268 years; its practice stands behind the official building codes of the Qing; and in the twentieth century it became the reference for the history of Chinese architecture and for a national style.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole: moat, wall, axis, Outer and Inner Court and the graded sequence are as legible as when finished, and the fires proved it, for each time a hall burned it was rebuilt to the plan and the rank of what was lost. The form had more authority than the timber, and it has outlived the empire that made it. The use changed and intensified: rule and residence, which survived five centuries and ended in 1924, then a museum for a century, its procession still walked from south to north by millions a year. Charged: the lost household; the fabric, largely Qing; the losses by fire; the occupation and looting of 1900; the removal of the court’s furnishings and collections; and repair and repainting whose fidelity is not judged here. The lost household and the renewed body hold it below the top.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The planning is the summit of the craft: a palace city laid true on one axis from its southern gate to its northern, every hall sized, roofed and coloured to its rank. The official timber frame is carried to its largest scale in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, eleven bays wide, on a forest of columns and bracket sets. The engineering under it is less seen and as fine: the marble terraces shed the rain through dragon-head spouts, and the Inner Golden Water River carries water through the palace. The costs are the medium’s. Timber burned, again and again, and the official manner is standardised production, not invention. Command of proportion, siting and system is load-bearing; structural daring is not.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the Hall of Supreme Harmony on its marble terrace and a servants’ court in the north-east corner; or the Meridian Gate and a pavilion in the Imperial Garden. They obey one law: axis and symmetry; the bay module; the courtyard enclosed and turned inward; roof form, tile colour, bracket sets and the number of ridge beasts graded by rank. The same grammar governs the greatest hall and the smallest, and the Qing rebuilt within it. The range is wide (state ritual, administration, the dynasty’s family, worship, scholarship, storage and gardens), and the law holds across all of it, because it is a graded law, made to hold a range by degree. What resists is small: the gardens, where the law loosens by design, and the Qing compounds of the north-east, which keep the grammar but bend the plan.

Score: 9.5 / 10

The orders held are seven. The cosmos: the pole, heaven and earth, the four directions, built into plan and name. The state: audience, enthronement and the official order in ranks. The dynasty and the family: emperor and empress, consorts and heirs, and the succession, on one axis with the state. Labour and service: the quarters of eunuchs and maids, the kitchens and storehouses, built in though kept at the margins. The sacred: ancestral and Buddhist halls. Nature and learning: the gardens and the library. History: two dynasties in one fabric, and the end of the empire within its walls. One plan places each by its distance from the throne, so they are integrated. What is held weakly is the single consciousness and the common life: labour is present but hidden, and the city enters only as the order that faces the throne.

Score: 9.0 / 10