Why is the Forbidden City called the Forbidden City? Does purple have any special meaning?

The name "Forbidden City" is related to China's ancient philosophy and astronomy. China people believe in "harmony between man and nature" and "harmony between man and nature". Therefore, the structure of the Forbidden City is modeled after the legendary "Tiangong". In ancient astronomy, the stars were divided into three walls, surrounded by 28 constellations, among which Ziweiyuan (Polaris) was located in the center of the sky, which was the center of all the stars. The purple in the Forbidden City is the purple in the purple, which means that the palace is also the "middle" of the world. "Forbidden" refers to the residence of the royal family, which has incomparable dignity and is strictly forbidden to intrude.

There are 9,999 houses in the Forbidden City, and there are 9 bronze doornails on each door. This strange number phenomenon is related to China's understanding of numbers in ancient times. The ancients thought that the word "9" was the largest in numbers and the emperor was the largest in the world, so the corresponding "9" must be used. The homonym of "9" is "long", which means "everlasting", so it also means that mountains and rivers will last forever and never change color. The architectural names of the Forbidden City all have the words "benevolence", "harmony", "zhong" and "an", such as the square and the Hall of Supreme Harmony. The meanings represented by these words are the core of China's Confucianism, namely "righteousness" and "benevolence", which highlights the traditional Confucianism.

The names of Gan Qing Palace, Jiaotai Palace and Kunning Palace, where the emperor and queen lived, are also related to the Confucian classic The Book of Changes. Zhouyi said that "dry" symbolizes "heaven" and represents "male"; "Kun" symbolizes "land" and represents "female"; The middle "Thai" means "safe and smooth".

The whole meaning is "heaven and earth meet Thailand", suggesting that the relationship between the emperor and the queen is harmonious, plus "integrity" and "peace", imagine the life in the palace.

Very beautiful.

The colors in the Forbidden City are also meaningful. The Forbidden City mostly uses yellow glazed tiles, and the indoor colors are mostly yellow, especially the layout of Gan Qing Palace. This usage comes from the five elements theory in the ancient classic Shangshu. The ancients thought that the world was composed of five elements: gold, wood, water, fire and earth, and the five elements interacted with each other, so the world changed. "Yellow" stands for "land" and is the foundation of all things, and the emperor is also the foundation of all people.

So the palace is mostly yellow.

The only building in the Forbidden City that uses black glazed tiles is the Wen Yuan Pavilion of the Library. In the five elements, "black" symbolizes "water", and "water" can be gram.

"Fire", so the library uses black tiles, representing water and fire, which means fire prevention. Design intent can be described as good. While appreciating the magnificent external buildings, if we carefully taste the cultural significance symbolized by each building, we will be full of interest and significance. Only by understanding the materialized China culture can we understand the great Forbidden City.

1406, Emperor Yongle of the Ming Dynasty began to build the Forbidden City. According to the records of Ming history, 65,438+10,000 best craftsmen and 1 10,000 ordinary workers built a huge palace which is rare in the world, and it took 15 years to finally complete it. Since then, the Ming and Qing emperors have rebuilt and expanded many times, but the overall appearance has not changed much.

The Forbidden City is a brick-wood building, and the materials were the best at that time. Before entering the Forbidden City, you might as well look at the bricks outside the city wall. This kind of brick is called clear slurry brick, that is, mud is soaked in pool water, precipitated, filtered out, and then dried to make a green body. The size of the bricks is also larger than the general ones, with a length of 48 cm, a width of 24 cm, a thickness of 12 cm, and each brick weighs 24 kg. It took120,000 pieces to build the city wall. The floor of the Forbidden City Palace is made of bricks, which is another kind, called bricks. This kind of brick is delicate in texture, slightly golden yellow, powerful in knocking, extremely light and brittle, and the workmanship is naturally much more complicated. The entire Forbidden City used 65,438+billion bricks. A very fine material is also used for bonding between bricks and boards. This material mainly includes cooked and mashed glutinous rice and egg white separated from eggs. The mixed adhesive is not only strong in adhesion, but also smooth and beautiful. Make this Chinese-style "solidification"

Soil needs thousands of kilograms of glutinous rice and eggs.

The wood used in the Forbidden City comes from the mountains in fangshan county, a suburb of Beijing, from the south of the Yangtze River, and even from Sichuan and Yunnan. Most of the timber south of the Yangtze River was transported from the canal and landed at today's Dongbianmen. Wood used in the Qing Dynasty and some tiles in the Forbidden City in Northeast China were made in advance, that is, the designer set the size and sample tiles, and the producer made a large number of them according to the list. Tiles in different places have different patterns.

There are tens of thousands of boulders used in the Forbidden City, the largest of which is behind the Baohe Hall. This boulder engraved with nine dragons is 16.57 meters long, 3.07 meters thick and weighs about 250 tons. It takes 20,000 migrant workers and 1 12000 silver to transport from Fangshan to Beijing. The transportation time is chosen in winter, a well is drilled every 50 meters along the way, water is drawn to pour the road into ice, and then the boulder is pulled to slide on the ice, which takes 28 days and the journey is 50 kilometers, which is arduous. From materials to architecture, from layout to implication, the Forbidden City is a treasure of China. In addition, antique calligraphy and paintings and documents preserved in the Forbidden City are also rare and priceless. In fact, the Forbidden City is the largest museum and treasure hall in China.

The Wenhua Hall of the Forbidden City has collected more than 500 years' archives of the central and local organs in Ming and Qing Dynasties, with 74 volumes,100000 pieces, which is the largest and most valuable historical materials in China. In Wen Yuan Pavilion, there is a complete Siku Quanshu, which contains the most important academic works in ancient China, with 3,503 kinds and 6,304 volumes. There are more than 0/0 pieces of collection in the Forbidden City, including the Art Museum, Arts and Crafts Museum, Painting Museum, Qing Palace Toy Museum, Bronze Museum, ceramics museum, Watch Museum, Treasure Museum, Woodblock Museum, Ming and Qing Furniture Museum, etc. There are about 1 10,000 precious collections, some of which are orphans, but only exist in the Forbidden City.