The historical reasons why Emperor Yongle of the Ming Dynasty built the Forbidden City
In the first year of Yongle, the capital of the Ming Dynasty was Nanjing, China today. This ancient capital of the Six Dynasties has been considered kingly since the Eastern Han Dynasty. Zhu Yuanzhang, Emperor Taizu of the Ming Dynasty, set his capital here and built the Royal Palace by integrating the essence of Chinese palace architecture for two thousand years. Today only these ruins remain of the palace, but it still retains its original splendor.
At this time, the city of Beijing was still on the territory of the Ming Dynasty and was a chief secretary of the imperial court, called Peiping. There are few people here. Zhu Di was named King of Yan when he was 11 years old. He and his old subordinates were familiar with this place and were full of affection for it.
On the thirteenth day of the first lunar month in the first year of Yongle, Zhu Di returned to the palace after performing sacrifices to heaven and earth according to the ancestral system. When the monarchs and ministers gathered together, a minister named Li Zhigang, the Minister of Rites, made a suggestion. He said, I thought Beiping was the place where the emperor carried out Longxing. We should follow Emperor Taizu Gao's system of setting up another capital city and make Peiping the capital. Emperor Yongle immediately agreed happily. In the next few hours, an imperial edict to elevate Peiping to Beijing and become the second Kyoto of the dynasty was announced to the world.
The news soon spread throughout the country, and a great palace would be born.
Emperor Yongle, who had just ascended the throne, used such an imperial edict to declare to the world and express his philosophy of governing the world.
From the historical data we have seen so far, we can find that Zhu Di in 1403 AD was in a very subtle and uneasy atmosphere. As an emperor who had just ascended the throne after seizing the imperial power from his nephew, he faced too many difficult problems. The killings of former officials of Emperor Jianwen who opposed him continued.
After killing many people, Zhu Di felt very uneasy. He also asked Ru Chang, a minister next to him, if I would offend the ancestors of heaven and earth by doing this?
What made him even more uneasy was that when Nanjing was invaded, his nephew Emperor Jianwen mysteriously disappeared in a fire, and his life and death were unknown. Although he held a grand funeral for his nephew according to the etiquette of the emperor. However, many historians of later generations believed that it was not Emperor Jianwen himself who was buried at that time. The real Emperor Jianwen was probably on the run. This incident became Zhu Di's biggest worry.
One day later, when he went to court, Zhu Di was almost assassinated by the imperial censor Jing Qing.
After this incident, Zhu Di often had nightmares in Nanjing. He may have begun to miss his hometown Beijing more strongly.
Standing among the ruins of the Nanjing Imperial Palace, it is not difficult to imagine that Emperor Yongle, who had lived in the north for many years, might dislike living in Nanjing less and less. He began to plan the move of the First Kyoto to Beijing.
Soon in May of that year, during a court appearance, he told the ministers that Beijing was my old feudal state. With the state society and the state, the ritual governance of the capital will be implemented. However, the emperor's suggestion met with fierce opposition from the ministers. From then on, Zhu Di became much more cautious. He began to make systematic and meticulous preparations for moving the capital in a roundabout and secret way.
In 1403 AD, the city that had just been renamed Beijing from Peiping suddenly had many southerners from Jiangsu, Zhejiang and other places. They received the imperial court's permission to move to Beijing and receive preferential treatment of being exempt from paying taxes for five years. These people were generally relatively wealthy and soon started doing business in Beijing that they had done in the south. At the same time, many more farmers began to cultivate wasteland in the suburbs of Beijing, and large-scale immigration projects began.
When the mighty immigrant team was rushing to Beijing, on the northwest grasslands thousands of miles away from Beijing, the cavalry army commanded by Timur Khan of Mongolia had already set off towards the Central Plains. The north of the Ming Dynasty faced another threat.
However, just as Emperor Yongle was preparing to deploy his defenses for battle, Timur suddenly died of illness during the march. A great war disappeared without a trace.
In June 1405 AD, when the southeast wind blew, Zheng He was dispatched by Emperor Yongle to lead a fleet on an ocean voyage. With the mission of Emperor Yongle to show the might of the Ming Dynasty to the world, he sailed across the vast ocean. It is said that this voyage was also to find the missing Emperor Jianwen.
In August 1406 AD, when Zheng He's fleet was marching mightily, something happened in the Nanjing Palace that made Zhu Di happy. We have been unable to verify whether it was the secret instruction of Emperor Yongle himself or the result of the ministers' own speculation.
Anyway, at the court on this day, a group of ministers headed by Qiu Fu suggested building a new palace in Beijing. Emperor Yongle accepted this suggestion very happily.
So a huge project began.
Emperor Yongle began to send his closest confidants to all parts of the country to prepare for this huge project. Among them were Song Li, the minister of the Ministry of Industry, Shi Kui, the right minister of the Ministry of official affairs, and Gu Pu, the left minister of the Ministry of household affairs.
The places these people are about to go are the mountains in Huguang, Sichuan and other places. What they are going to mine this time is nanmu. The precious nanmu grows mostly in steep places in primeval forests, where tigers, leopards, snakes and pythons often appear. Officials and people went into the mountains to collect wood at great risk, and many people lost their lives. In later generations, some people used the phrase "a thousand dollars to enter the mountain, five hundred to leave the mountain" to describe the cost of harvesting wood.
This is the interior of the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City today. The nanmu that was cut down at that time was used to make these pillars. Those huge nanmu trees from the Yongle period are no longer visible in the Hall of Supreme Harmony. These huge pillars were pieced together from pine trees in the later Qing Dynasty.
This is a wood transport project carried out in June 2004 during the overhaul of the Forbidden City. Transporting these huge pieces of wood to the Forbidden City through modern transportation is also a complex and arduous task.
So how did nanmu, which was several times larger than these timbers, transported to the Forbidden City 500 years ago?
Song Li, the minister of the Ministry of Industry who was sent to Sichuan, described to the emperor a legendary scene of a big tree coming out of the mountain. One day there was a flash flood and a big tree flowed down the river. When a huge boulder blocks the road, the big tree makes a loud sound like thunder and hits the boulder. The boulders were split and the trees were intact. Later Emperor Yongle named the mountain where this story happened as Shenmu Mountain.
This is just a special example. More wood is transported to Beijing from the high mountains in northern Sichuan, Guizhou, and Hubei provinces, relying on natural rivers and built canals.
During the Yongle period, the wood harvesting work to build a new palace is said to have lasted for 13 years. However, it is also very difficult to mine the stone for building the palace. Behind the Baohe Hall, we saw the largest Danbi stone in the Forbidden City. It was carved from a complete stone during the Ming Dynasty. And how was such a huge stone transported here?
According to historical records, these stones come from Dashiwo in Fangshan, a suburb in the southwest of Beijing, and Qingbaikou in Mentougou. It spans 600 years from the Ming and Qing dynasties, and white marble stones are still produced here until now. We finally discovered the mining and transportation process of the stone behind the Baohe Temple in the Ming Dynasty historical materials. The mining of this stone required more than 10,000 migrant workers and more than 6,000 soldiers, and transporting it to the capital was even more arduous. Tens of thousands of migrant workers were building roads and filling holes on both sides of the road transporting stones. A well was dug every one mile or so, and in the middle of winter when the water dripped and turned into ice, water was drawn from the well and poured into the ice channel. It took 20,000 migrant workers and more than 1,000 mules 28 days to transport them to the capital. Most of the huge stones that were also painstakingly transported to the Forbidden City were placed on the royal road along the central axis of the Forbidden City.
According to current research by experts and scholars, the preparation process for this palace construction lasted nearly ten years.
In these ten years, Beijing gradually became the busiest and largest construction site in the territory of the Ming Dynasty. This is what we have reproduced today with a three-dimensional animation, the scene at the construction site in Beijing when the Forbidden City was built. The resulting famous construction site names have survived to this day.
In such a huge project, only a few people can be recorded in history. It is said that the number of craftsmen who worked hard on this palace exceeded one million. There are also some lucky ones among them, including two craftsmen from Shanxi, Wang Shun and Hu Liang. Emperor Yongle inspected the construction site one day and saw their paintings. The emperor held Wang Shun's shoulders and praised him.
Chen Gui, the Marquis of Taining, was appointed as the commander-in-chief of the reconstruction and construction of Beijing city and palace in 1406 AD. Emperor Yongle wrote in an edict to Chen Gui: "Be kind to the soldiers and migrant workers on the construction site, have regular diet and rest, and don't overwork yourself. You must understand my desire to care for the people." Chen Gui has been supervising work in Beijing. , until his death in 1419 AD, he did not wait for the day when the Forbidden City was completed.
According to historical records, among the skilled craftsmen involved in this project, more than 20 people, led by the old carpenter Jin Heng, were promoted to camp maintenance chiefs at the same time. Some other famous figures, such as Lu Xiang, who was responsible for stone production, and Cai Xin, who was responsible for craftsmanship, have also been recorded in history.
This is Zhongnanhai in present-day Beijing. More than 600 years ago, before the Forbidden City was built, Zhu Di's Yanwang Palace and the temporary palace before the Forbidden City was completed were located in the northwest of this area.
In 1409 AD, Zhu Di lived here in the name of hunting. From 1409 AD to 1421 AD after the palace was completed, he spent 5 years and 8 months in Beijing. This caused the decision-making, military and administrative systems of the Ming Dynasty to gradually move northward. A painter named Wang Fu who followed Zhu Di to Beijing created "Eight Scenes of Yanjing" during this period, using delicate brushwork to depict the beauty and customs of Beijing at that time. During that period, Beijing gradually showed a prosperous scene. Immigrant military households reclaimed farmland in the suburbs, rapidly improving Beijing's agricultural production level.
Beijing began to become more and more important to this dynasty.
From 1410 AD to 1414 AD, Zhu Di used Beijing as his base and crossed the Great Wall twice to conduct personal expeditions, defeating the Mongolian tribes that had threatened Beijing for many years. After a victory, he reviewed the large army he led.
Just when Zhu Di was planning to move the capital to Beijing, one of his closest people passed away. This is Empress Xu. Their marriage was arranged by Zhu Yuanzhang himself. How to bury this married wife? The mausoleum should be built in Nanjing, but Zhu Di secretly sent a minister and a Feng Shui master to Beijing to find Ji Yang to build the mausoleum. Two years later, a place more than 20 miles north of Changping was designated as a forbidden area in the mausoleum by Zhu Di.
This is today’s Ming Tombs. By using the death of Queen Xu to build the mausoleum, the ministers all realized that this was a signal from the emperor to move the capital.
After this, some ministers in Nanjing began to speak out and directly opposed Emperor Yongle's hidden intention of moving the capital. Soon, Henan chief envoys Zhou Wenbao, Wang Wenzhen and counselor Chen Zuo were relegated to the countryside to be ordinary farmers by Zhu Di, while the rest had no choice but to remain silent.
One day in November 1416 AD, Zhu Di suddenly summoned the civil and military ministers to discuss a sensitive topic about Beijing with them in a pleasant manner. The emperor showed unusual democracy in the construction of the Beijing Palace, and this time the ministers did not raise any objections. Not only did they unanimously approve the construction of the Forbidden City to start as soon as possible, but they also praised Beijing's superior geographical location and strongly demanded that the first capital of the Ming Dynasty be located in Beijing. They said: "Beijing rests on Juyongguan in the north, Taihang Mountain in the west, Shanhaiguan in the east, and overlooks the Central Plains in the south. It has thousands of miles of fertile fields and magnificent mountains and rivers. It is enough to control the four directions and rule the world. It is indeed an imperial capital that can last for eternity." Zhu Di's deliberate desire to move the capital for many years , instantly became the consensus of the monarch and his ministers. Later historians believe that this decision meant that China's political center began to move northward, and China's geopolitics changed from then on. This change has affected China's political landscape for hundreds of years until today.
It was the early morning of April 10, 2005, when such a group of workers appeared inside the palace walls of the Palace Museum. They came here to complete a project, which was to carry out a large-scale renovation of the palace. This overhaul will last 19 years.
Nearly 600 years ago, in the same place, 100,000 craftsmen were gathered at one time to start building this palace. Most of them come from Henan, Shandong, Shanxi, Anhui and other places.
Today we have no way of knowing how they built this palace. There is no way of knowing what untold stories they have experienced.
The official record of the construction of this palace can be found in the "Records of the Ming Dynasty": "When Guihai was first built in Beijing, all temples, palaces, and gates were regulated like those in Nanjing. Gaochang is more magnificent than this, and it is finally completed." In 1419 AD, the construction of this palace can only be recorded in writing.
Today, we are fortunate to be able to record these images with cameras. From these scenes of major renovations, we can vaguely capture some of the imprints of the time when this palace was built.
At this point in our story, we have to have some doubts about the historical records. We also saw this record in "Records of the Ming Dynasty": "Construction began in June of the 15th year of Yongle." Some researchers today use this as a basis to believe that the Forbidden City was built from the 15th year of Yongle, which took three and a half years. Built. Other scholars believe that such a huge project of more than 8,000 houses cannot be built in three and a half years even today.
But no matter what kind of debate there is, the engineering methods of Chinese classical architecture have not changed significantly for thousands of years. Although it has been nearly six hundred years since the Forbidden City was built, the construction methods used by craftsmen today still continue the craftsmanship of that time. These traditional crafts were summarized into eight masterpieces in the Qing Dynasty. That is, wood work, tile work, stone work, wood work, soil work, paint work, color painting, and paste mounting work. The craftsmanship we're showing off in the shots today was carried out during this overhaul. It is almost the same technique as that used by Ming Dynasty craftsmen about six hundred years ago.
In 1420 AD, the palace was finally built. It was born on the site of the Yuan Dadu Imperial Palace. The Yanchun Pavilion, which was once very famous in the capital of the Yuan Dynasty, was replaced by Jingshan, and the entire palace complex extended from north to south and was located in the center of Beijing, becoming the new sacred place of this dynasty.
The bricks, tiles, wood and stones here, the colors here, and the spatial layout here all reveal the civilizational will and ideas of the Chinese people. From then on, it began to experience the joys and sorrows of 24 emperors and many concubines and princes. Many wonderful moments in Chinese history began to be staged.
In 1421 AD, just after the palace was built, the people ushered in the Lunar New Year's Day of that year. On this day, Zhu Di held a grand congratulatory ceremony in the newly completed palace. He climbed up to the majestic Fengtian Hall and accepted the kneeling of ministers. Zhu Di and the ministers were inspired by this magnificent palace.
Spring arrived soon. For craftsmen, civilians, soldiers, and even prisoners in prisons who had served in Beijing all year round, the emperor's edict of reducing taxes, exempting them from military service, and amnesty changed their fate.
It is said that after the palace was built, the proud Emperor Yongle called in an official named Hu who could predict the future and asked him to calculate what would happen in the future. Hu replied: "There will be a fire in the palace on the eighth day of April next year." Emperor Yongle was furious, put him in prison, and said that if there is no fire by then, he will behead you. No one took this man's words to heart. Everyone was immersed in the joy after the new palace was built. It was at this time that Emperor Yongle sent Zheng He to lead his fleet on his sixth mission to the West.
On May 9, 1421 AD, the weather suddenly changed with thunder and lightning, and the fire in the three main halls suddenly broke out and was really hit by thunder and fire. Whether Zhu Di asked officials to calculate the future of the new palace cannot be verified historically.
The story about the prediction by the official named Hu can basically be established as a legend. The correct record of the fire in the "History of the Ming Dynasty" is as follows: "Construction started in June of the 15th year of Yongle" is concise and concise without any more words.
The three main halls built by Emperor Yongle with a huge investment of manpower, material and financial resources in the past twenty years only existed for three months and were destroyed by fire from the sky. This was a fatal blow to Zhu Di. In addition to deploring the destruction of the palace, what made him even more painful was his doubts about himself. Zhu Di ordered the civil and military ministers to say: "I am frightened by the disaster in Fengtian and other three palaces, and I don't know what to do. If my actions are really inappropriate, everyone should tell them openly so that I can have a chance to change. To return God's will." The edict and the request for words triggered a fierce reaction from the officials. Some people seized this opportunity to accuse Zhu Di of being overjoyed and accused him of making the wrong decision to move the capital to Beijing. Then, Emperor Yongle, who was conflicted between fear and anger, had his ministers kneel in front of the Meridian Gate to debate with each other, and even executed an official who accused him.
Soon after, Zhu Di devoted himself to eliminating border troubles and launched the sixth northern expedition to Mongolia. However, his health deteriorated, and he actually fell off his horse during his military life. Finally, he met the end of his life in Yumuchuan on the way to the northern expedition to Mongolia.
The three main halls of the Daming Palace, which were destroyed by fire, were not renovated during the Yongle period. Over the next twenty years, the central area of the Forbidden City, which was once as glorious as a dream, was a charred ruin.
More than ten years have passed in the blink of an eye. In 1436, the first year of Zhengtong, Zhu Qizhen, the Yingzong of the Ming Dynasty, came to the throne. This child, whose actual age was only 7 years old, admired his great-grandfather Zhu Di very much. As soon as he ascended the throne, he did something that neither his father nor his grandfather had done - rebuild the Forbidden City.
In the autumn of this year, Zhu Qizhen issued an edict to "order eunuch Ruan An, governor Tongzhi Shen Qing, and Shaobao Minister Wuzhong to lead tens of thousands of soldiers to build the nine-gate tower of the capital." Five years later, he officially issued an edict to rebuild the three main palaces and the second palaces of Qianqing and Kunning. The project officially started on the day the edict was issued.
A year and a half later, the reconstruction work that had been delayed for more than ten years was completed.
Everything has settled. The Forbidden City was intact again, and an imperial edict was once again announced to the world.
The Forbidden City in Beijing eventually became the highest political center that ruled the world during the Ming and Qing dynasties of China; a unique classic in the history of architectural art in the world, it has been proudly standing in the world since then; it has become one of the most beautiful buildings in human history so far. The largest palace complex in China; it eventually became the most common historical and cultural heritage of all mankind.