THE FORBIDEN CITY

When we stepped on the foot of China's vast plains, crossed in my mind a poem from the era of ancient China. The poem tells about the beauty of the imperial palace there. The contents are as follows, "Without seeing his own royal palace splendor, you will not know the greatness of the emperor." Hem, Is it true? C'mon, we both look! Apparently, only caught a glimpse of the palace rotation in Beijing, the poem has a point too. China's imperial palace was once used during the reign of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1911). Currently, the Forbidden City is used as a museum called the Palace Museum. It is located in downtown Beijing. 750 meters long from east to west, and 960 yards from the north to south. Wide totals 720 000 square meters. So, overall, this palace is considered the world's largest palace complex. Uniquely, in order to protect the palace from enemy attack, encircled by a moat around it is 52 m wide and as deep as 6 m.Still added again with 3 km along the wall and out into the high 10 m. For palace complex, there are four gates that guard tower around.  Protected in a vast palace complex is divided into two parts. Palace south and north. The southern part of the emperor functioned as a place to work, while the northern part serves as a place to live the emperor and his family. All the buildings are built with a neat and symmetrical in all its parts. In the southern part there are three buildings that simply majestic and beautiful. Each is a Hall of Supreme Harmony (Tai He Dian), The Hall of Medium Harmony (Zhong He Dian) and Hall of Protective Harmony (Bao He Dian). Among these three the most amazing thing was the Hall of Supreme Harmony. In this room that held many important ceremonies such as ceremonial elantikan emperor and high-level officials as well as the implementation of the marriage ceremony where the royal family. In the north, there are nine separate housing complex. In these complexes, the emperor and his family lived. In the north where the emperor lived there the imperial garden. In 1406, Emperor Yongle of the Sun Dynasty started to build the forbidden city. From historical records, construction of this palace mobilizing labor as much as a million people, 100,000 artists, and it took 15 years to complete. Overall, building this palace to spend 3.1 billion bricks to build this palace. For taped used special glue made from a mixture of egg white and sticky rice. To get the wood, taken from the forest in Fangshan Mountain and the areas of Sichuan or Yunnan. To building foundation and building palaces, used tens of thousands of stone blocks. The biggest one is used as the foundation of the Hall of Protective Harmony (Bao Ho, Dian), weighing 25 tons. Stone block sizes are: length 16.57 m, width 3.07 m, and thickness of 1.7 m. This stone was brought from Fangshan district which is about 50 km. To move the stones were used as many as 20,000 workers. A more extreme removal was done in the winter with above attractive stone artificial ice track and takes up to 28 days.Currently, the Forbidden City is the largest museum with the largest collection in Asia. In it are stored the various royal documents, paintings, sculptures, and share other rare objects of art. Currently, in the Forbidden City there are more than 10 museums. These museums have collections which, when combined, would amount to a million pieces, most of them not found elsewhere. It's very amazing, right.

Source: Mentari Magazine, Editon 65*)