Beijing · A Government and a Household, in That Order
Forbidden City (故宫)
Five centuries of emperors lived and worked here, and the plan says which was which: the front half is an office and the back half is a house. Reading that division is the difference between a walk and a visit.
Quick Facts
The Short Version
| What it is | The palace complex of the Ming and Qing courts, in use from 1420 to 1924 and a museum since 1925 |
|---|---|
| Where | The centre of Beijing, on the city’s north to south axis, north of Tiananmen |
| When | Built between 1406 and 1420 under the Yongle emperor, then repaired and rebuilt many times. UNESCO inscribed it in 1987 |
| How it divides | Outer court at the front for government and ceremony; inner court behind it for the emperor’s household. Nearly everything follows from that |
| Booking | Timed tickets, real-name registration, passport required at the gate. Released a set number of days ahead and they sell out. Book before you fly |
| Closed | Mondays for most of the year. Check before planning a day around it |
| Time needed | Half a day for the axis. A full day if you go into the side palaces and galleries |
| Language | Good English signage on the axis, thinner in the side palaces. Audio guides at the gate |
Why Go
The Plan Is the Argument
1. Front half, back half
Coming in from the south you cross three courtyards and three great halls before you reach anything anyone lived in. That front section is the outer court, and it was a workplace: audiences, examinations, enthronements, the reception of envoys. It is deliberately oversized, symmetrical and empty, because the scale was part of the message.
Behind it, past a gate, the scale drops. The inner court is where the emperor, the empress, the consorts, the children and several thousand staff actually lived, in courtyards small enough to be habitable. The buildings are closer together, the ornament is different, and the logic changes from ceremony to household. Visitors who walk the axis without noticing the change experience the whole thing as one long corridor of similar halls, which is the commonest way to be disappointed here.
2. The building that was never finished
In one of the eastern palaces there is a stone and cast-iron structure standing in a dry basin, its upper frames still open to the sky. It was begun in 1909 as a Western-style water pavilion, with glass walls and water intended to surround the lower storey so that the rooms would be seen through it. The money ran out, the dynasty ended, and it has stood unfinished ever since.
It is worth walking to. The court’s interest in European building did not begin or end with the garden pavilions burned in 1860, and this is the last and strangest example: an iron frame in a Ming palace, abandoned three years before the empire was.
The catch. Almost everyone walks the central axis from south to north and leaves, which takes two hours and shows perhaps a fifth of the site. The eastern and western palaces, where the ceramics, bronzes, clocks and treasure galleries are, are quiet by comparison and hold the things most visitors say afterwards they wish they had seen.
Orientation
One Way Through, and Where to Leave It
Entry is from the south at the Meridian Gate and exit is at the north. You cannot walk back against the flow, so anything you skip is skipped. The axis runs Meridian Gate, the three great halls, the gate to the inner court, the three rear palaces, the imperial garden, and out.
The decision to make is where to leave the axis. The eastern palaces hold the galleries of clocks and treasures and the smaller courtyards; the western side is quieter still. Both rejoin the axis further north, so a detour costs you nothing but time.
Practical
Things Worth Knowing
Book before you fly
Tickets are released a set number of days ahead, require real-name registration, and sell out in peak season. Bring the passport you booked with; it is checked at the gate.
Closed on Mondays
For most of the year. A Beijing itinerary that puts this on a Monday has to be rebuilt.
Go up Jingshan afterwards
The hill directly north of the exit gives the only view that makes the scale legible, and it costs almost nothing. Ten minutes’ walk from the north gate.
Leave the axis at least once
Two hours down the middle is the default visit and the weakest one. One side courtyard changes the day.
Timing
When to Go
| Season | The case for | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| September to November | The clearest air and the best light on the roofs, which is what the place is built for | The first week of October is the national holiday and tickets vanish |
| March to May | Blossom in the imperial garden and mild walking on a site with a lot of open stone | Spring wind and dust, and the courtyards funnel it |
| December to February | Snow on the golden roofs, the thinnest crowds of the year, and the silhouettes at their clearest | Cold, and the courtyards are entirely exposed. Dress for standing still |
| June to August | Long opening hours and full access | Hot, humid and extremely crowded. The stone courtyards hold heat all afternoon |
Context
Why There Are Two Palace Museums
The court left in stages. The last emperor abdicated in 1912 but continued to live in the inner court until he was expelled in 1924; the Palace Museum opened in 1925 with the collections still in place. That arrangement lasted eight years.
In 1933, with Japanese forces advancing in the north, the museum packed a large part of the collection into crates and moved it out of Beijing. Over the following sixteen years those crates travelled thousands of kilometres across wartime China, by rail, river and road, and were stored in temples, caves and warehouses. Losses were remarkably small.
At the end of the civil war a portion of the evacuated collection was shipped to Taiwan and became the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The rest returned to Beijing. That is why the objects from one palace are now in two museums a strait apart, and why neither collection is complete on its own.
Which institution holds what, and on what basis, is a political question and is not this page’s subject. The movement of the crates between 1933 and 1949 is a matter of record and is one of the larger acts of cultural evacuation anywhere.
Nearby
Other Stops on the Same Trip
Spot · 3 km
Prince Gong’s Mansion (恭王府)
A princely compound behind the lakes, showing how the people around the emperor lived. The same plan logic at one tenth the scale.
Spot · 4 km
Temple of Heaven (天坛)
The ritual complex on the same city axis to the south, where the emperor performed the state sacrifices.
Spot · 13 km
Old Summer Palace (圆明园)
The imperial gardens northwest of the city, burned in 1860 and kept as a ruin. Where the court actually preferred to be.
Where to Base
Beijing (北京)
The palace sits at the centre of the old city and the whole plan of Beijing is arranged around it: the axis running north to south, the altars at the compass points, the lakes and princely compounds to the northwest. Understanding the palace first makes the rest of the city legible rather than the other way round.
Two days covers the imperial layer comfortably: this and Jingshan on one, Temple of Heaven and the hutong on the other. The gardens in the northwest and the Great Wall need a day each on top.
Experiences
What You Can Actually Do Here
On site · 2 hr
The axis, south to north
The three great halls, the gate, the rear palaces and the garden, in the order the court used them.
On site · 2 hr
The side palaces and galleries
Clocks, ceramics, bronzes and the treasure rooms in the eastern and western courtyards, which most visitors walk straight past.
After · 45 min
Jingshan for the view
The artificial hill north of the exit, and the only place the complex reads as a whole.
Worth a full day if you can get the ticket, and book it before anything else in Beijing. Walk the axis, then deliberately leave it for the side palaces, then climb Jingshan on the way out. Come expecting the plan of a government rather than a sequence of beautiful halls, and the visit does what it should.
Plan a Beijing Route Around the Palace
Tell us your dates and what you are after, and our local team will build the route: tickets secured in advance, the axis and the side galleries with someone who can explain the plan, and Jingshan at the end for the view that makes sense of it.