Chapter 3 Section 2 Construction of the Forbidden City in Beijing

After Ming Chengzu Zhu Di won the throne in 1403 AD, he moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, and ordered Chen Gui and Wu Zhong to be responsible for planning the city of Beijing and building the imperial city.At this time, there were already ancestral rules for the planning of the capital, and there was a foundation in Beijing left over from the Yuan Dynasty.In the construction of the imperial city and palace buildings, the Ming Dynasty had a large number of skilled craftsmen with mature skills. They not only had experience in building houses, but also a group of famous craftsmen who could design and organize construction.

In 1407 AD, Chen Gui and Wu Zhong mobilized manpower and started the large-scale construction of the imperial city.The first job of construction is to prepare materials. The palace building first needs wood, the pillars, beams, and surrounding doors and windows of the building are all made of wood, so the wood needs not only a large amount, but also high quality.Most of them are produced in Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hunan, and Hubei. Logging from the producing areas, sending the wood to rivers and Yangtze Rivers during the summer flood season, and then transporting them to Beijing by canals, this process sometimes takes three to four years.

Followed by bricks, bricks are used for the walls of the imperial city, bricks are used for the walls and floors of buildings, and some floors have to be paved with three layers of bricks. According to statistics, the entire imperial city building needs as many as 80 million bricks.Moreover, the quality requirements of some bricks are very high. For example, the ground bricks used for the main palace are called "golden bricks", which are fired from a kind of high-quality clay.This kind of soil has to be soaked and filtered to remove all impurities in the soil, and the fine-grained soil is clarified. After the bricks are fired into bricks, the surface of the bricks must be smoothed and smeared with tung oil. Bricks are also called "Chengma bricks". They are hard in texture, shiny on the surface, and have a metallic sound when knocked, so they are called "golden bricks". The most famous production area of ​​"golden bricks" is in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, and all these bricks are often sent to Beijing by boat via canal.

Stone is also used in a large amount in palace construction. The platform under the building, the railings around the platform, the stone bridge, and the main road in the imperial city are all made of stone.In order to reduce transportation difficulties, materials were collected in Fangshan, Quyang and other places near Beijing as much as possible.However, the transportation of stone materials is much more difficult than that of wood and bricks, especially those large-scale stone sculptures, such as the stone lions in front of Tiananmen Square and the stone pillars of Huabiao.It is 16 meters long, 3.17 meters wide, and weighs more than 200 tons. This refers to the weight after processing. If calculated according to the original wool, the weight is much heavier.How did such heavy stones be transported from the quarry to the site of the Forbidden City?The clever craftsmen came up with a way, which is to dig wells along the way of transportation, take out the well water in winter and pour it on the road to freeze, forming an ice road, put large stones on dry boats, and use thousands of stones along the ice road. Tens of thousands of manpower were pulled to Beijing, and then carved and processed on site.

A large number of glazed tiles are also used in palace buildings. In order to obtain materials nearby, several kilns for firing glazed bricks and tiles were set up near Beijing. Now the Liulichang in Beijing and the Liuliqu in Mentougou are the sites of glazed kilns in those days.There is now a large wooden warehouse alley in Xicheng District of Beijing, and a square brick alley near the Drum Tower, which is where the warehouses for storing wood and square bricks were located at that time.The area of ​​the big wooden warehouse was as large as 3,000 houses at that time, which shows the large amount of wood used in palace construction.

This kind of material preparation took a total of 10 years. By 1417 AD, everything was ready, so the Ming court recruited 100,000 craftsmen from all over the country, and hundreds of thousands of migrant workers began large-scale construction.The entire Forbidden City covers an area of ​​720,000 square meters, with more than 1,000 buildings and 9,000 rooms, covering an area of ​​160,000 square meters, but it only took three years to complete it.In the eighteenth year of Ming Yongle (AD 1420), a resplendent Forbidden City appeared in the center of Beijing.