Barme, G.R., 2008, The forbidden city, Profile Books, London
- Author : Barme, G.R.
- Year : 2008
- Title English : The forbidden city
- Publisher : Profile Books
- Publisher's Location : London
- ISBN : 978-1-84668-011-3
- Pages : 251
- Comments : The Forbidden City, by Geremie R Barmé The emperors' old clothes Reviewed by Justin Wintle Friday, 8 February 2008 Independent.co.uk Web That the Forbidden City – Beijing's great palace complex – still stands requires explaining. When the last imperial dynasty, the Manchu Qing, was overthrown in 1912, many Republicans wanted it destroyed; 40 years later a similar iconoclasm prevailed after the triumph of the Communists. Yet even during the height of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s, a deep-seated, perhaps unconscious, superstition stayed Mao Zedong's hand. The bulldozers did not move in. As Churchill said of the House of Commons, "We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us." Once he was dead, it emerged that Mao had an unsuspected admiration for the "first emperor" Qin Shihuang. Since 1926, the care of the Forbidden City has been entrusted to an authority known as the Palace Museum, but Mao's portrait still adorns its main entrance. In retrospect, Mao belongs comfortably enough within a long line of Chinese strongmen who seized power to create a "new order" always curiously indebted to tradition. Much the same is true of the Forbidden City. Although it was created by the Ming dynasty in the early 15th century, Geremie Barmé reminds us that its style harks back to the "architectural precepts" of the Han dynasty, which assumed Qin Shihuang's mantle in 202BC. Nor did the Manchu, when they displaced the Ming in 1644, seek to build in their own style. Rather they aped the superior practices of the people they had conquered. So it is that the Forbidden City today is largely a Qing re-creation. In the depths of the inner palace the Qing may have set aside spaces for their own shamanistic worship, but outwardly they strove for continuity – as is patent from the names given so many buildings. Blended Daoist and Confucian themes are made manifest in wood and tile, so that formally at least the City is a monument to the values that bound China together so long. What went on within the Forbidden City seldom lived up to its celestial propaganda. In his genial, neatly written account, Barmé narrates the intrigues, the eunuchs and the concubines – supposedly delivered to the emperor's bedchamber naked inside a roll of silk. While there is little by way of primary research, Barmé pulls everything together nicely. In this, the year of the Beijing Olympics, books like his provide welcome respite from the onslaught of importunate analyses of China's rise to economic stardom. (From: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-forbidden-city-by-geremie-r-barmeacute-779354.html)