Forbidden City Facts and Figures By Devlin Mahoney 9MW

Brief introduction The forbidden city was originally built in 1406 to 1420 by Emperor Yong Le. It is said that Emperor Yong Le used 1,000,000 labourers and craftsmen to build the city. The building that we have now is not the original due to the original being burnt multiple times because of lanterns hitting it during the Lantern Festival or by court eunuchs or officials how would get rich from having it rebuilt. Also it was burnt down later when the Manchu stormed in and razed it. Not only did they did they burn the city but they brunt the rear books and paintings that were inside it. Their have also been 2 major lootings of it in the 1900s. The first was by the Japanese and the second by Kuomintang who took thousands of crates of treasures and put them in their museum during the communist take over in 1949. that museum is said to be one of the three best in the world.

size the forbidden city covers an area of 720,000 square meters. In comparison a foot ball field only covers 10,080 square meters making the forbidden city more that 71 times bigger. The great red wall is 8.6 meters wide at the bottom and 6.5 meters at the top. This helps to stop people from climbing over the wall. The surviving complex has 980 surviving buildings with 8.707 bays of rooms. It has a full time team of personnel restoring it. It takes 10 years to get around the whole thing and by then the start need restoring again.

materials The stone needed for the forbidden city was taken from Fangshan, a suburb of Beijing. The bricks were made from white lime and glutinous rice. The floors were covered in specially baked paving bricks from Suzhou made yellow by a special process. Also the roofs are glazed yellow tiles and the decorations are painted yellow. This is because yellow is the colour of the royal family.

bibliography author year Title of page site Date accessed crienglesh 2007 Forbidden City -- Building Materials 9/26/08 http://english.cri.cn/4026/2007/03/17/44@206483.htm wikipedia 2004 Forbidden City http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_City