Forbidden City vs. Imperial Rome

In the eighth century B.C., a little village along the Tiber River in Italy developed into the ancient imperial Rome. Town quickly grew into an empire that included the majority of Europe, Britain, northern Africa, Western Asia, and the Mediterranean islands (Changhong, Guo). One of China's most important wooden structures, The Forbidden, is surrounded by an eight-meter-high, 3.8-kilometer-long wall and a ditch that is fifty meters wide. The set of the city has approximately nine thousand pieces neatly arranged on a vast scale. Four doors have one piercing on each side. Each corner of the door has an elegant tower. White and yellow glazed tiles cover most of the essential buildings while red tiles cover the adjoining buildings. The base has symmetrical marble terraces. Since 1987, the Forbidden City has an inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

The Forbidden City of Beijing China was the imperial palace of the Ming Dynasty between 1368 and 1644 and the Qing Dynasty in 1644 to 1911 (Changhong, Guo). The Forbidden City is a model of the Chinese architecture which represents the culmination of the Chinese civilization art that from Asia Minor to the Pacific.

The imperial Rome occurred during a period of civil unrest and wars in the First Century BC as Rome transited from the Republic to an Empire during Julius Caesar’s dictatorship and later the reign of Emperor Augustus from 27BCE to 14CE, a period of peace and stability.

The Imperial Rome produced a variety of structures such as temples, government buildings, houses, baths, bridges, marketplaces, temples and aqueducts that contributed to the identity of the Emperor (Brown).

History

The Chinese Confucian traditional culture and The Book of Changes inspired the construction of the Forbidden City. Primarily, the China’s Beijing Forbidden City construction began in 1406 and ended in 1420 though other constrictions continued even after its completion.

The Forbidden City served as both political and ceremonial center in China during the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Changhong, Guo). The city was home to China’s emperor and his family, providing housing to the valuable national treasures. The town is a historical representation of China’s rich history of over five thousand years.

The reign of Augustus (Caius Octavius) became the first emperor of the Imperial Rome when it transited from the Roman Republic. Augustus reigned for forty years (from 27BC to 14 AD), and he boasted that he found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble. Augustus initiated buildings based on the Republican architecture in Imperial Rome to improve the Empire’s capital city (Bender, Henry V., and Ronald Mellor).

Religion

The Ming dynasty emperor was Han while the Ching Dynasty was Manchu. The Han and Manchu though both were Chinese, had different beliefs. Han believed in Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism while Manchu were Lamaism believers. The Ming Dynasty built the Forbidden City hence there were many places for worshipping Tao, Confucian and Buddha.

The Imperial Rome’s religion was polytheism as the Romans sacrificed and worshiped their gods before the coming of Judaism and Christianity. Religion was part of a daily life as each household had shrines where they offered prayers and libations to their gods until in 380 when Christianity became the state’s official religion (Changhong, Guo). .

Patron/Architect

The Forbidden City’s complex construction started in 1407, the fifth year of the reign of Yongle who was the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty (Changhong, Guo). The construction project ended in 1420 after a million workers, and over a hundred thousand artisans were forcefully involved in the long-term hard labor of constructing the Forbidden City.

Upon the completion of its construction, the Emperor crowned the Forbidden City as the Jewel of the Ming’s Dynasty new capital (Changhong, Guo). Soon after deeming Zijicheng or the famous ‘Purple City” which refers to the North Star, as a symbolizing the world revolved around the Emperor and his Forbidden City just as the heavens revolved around the North Star.

Weak rulers who succeeded Zhu Di’s reign and in 1644, Ming Dynasty collapsed and allowed Qing Dynasty conquered and reigned the Ming Dynasty (Changhong, Guo). Fires regularly destroyed the palace’s wooden pavilions though Qing exhibiting structures remained in the original complex. Emperor Kangxi began a drastic reconstruction project in the western and eastern parts of the burnt Forbidden City.

The Forbidden City, having attained the UNESCO’s World Heritage Site in 1987 has undergone lots of renovations and repairs (Changhong, Guo). . The complexity of the building would take workers over ten years to maintain all its buildings. In 1997, an estimated $25 million was necessary to renovate the buildings. The renovation of the trench allowed fish to inhabit the surrounding the wooden city wall and there is a proposal to build a three-story underground building as a museum below the Forbidden City as a storage of valuable treasures.

The Forbidden City is presently undergoing major renovation projects and is likely to end in 2020, marking the 600th anniversary of the imperial compound. The renovations have led to the use of pale grey slate and ochre-based flat finishing and covering ancient bricks with the acrylic paints (Changhong, Guo). In 2006, the Hall of Supreme Harmony still had to scaffold covering it.

The allocation of The World Monument Fund helps in removing and restoring the Qianlong Garden and other buildings that Qianlong Emperor lived. The Imperial Rome architecture retained the character of the Etruscan for some time after the founding of the Republic. However, in the 3rd Century, the builders started to emulate the external design of the building feature from the Greeks (Bender, Henry V., and Ronald Mellor).

Roman architecture retained the Etruscan character for some time after the founding of the Republic, but by the third century, BC began to derive much of the external design features from the Greeks. The Imperial Rome consisted of circular temples such as the Temple of Vesta (AD 205) which was sacred and had Vestal Virgins guarding it while keeping the holy fire. However, the fire destroyed the temple and underwent several reconstructions (Bender, Henry V., and Ronald Mellor).

Structure

The Forbidden City, covering 179 acres has a 52 foot wide, a thirty-foot high red wall and a moat that has a depth of two meters surrounding it. The City’s eight hundred buildings have a floor space of 720, 000 square meters and 150,000 square meters building space, containing approximately ten thousand rooms. The walls surrounding the court are 2,500 meters in length (Changhong, Guo).

The Imperial city where the craftsmen and the scribes worked surrounded the Forbidden City. The Inner City, in turn, surrounded the Forbidden City which was residential areas for the people. The two magnificent Temples of Agriculture and Heaven were in the South of the Forbidden City and eventual Outer City to protect the Forbidden City (Changhong, Guo).

The summer palace, approximately ten miles to the North of the Forbidden City was where the Emperor and their families spent much of their time as it was safe and secure from external invasion or assassinations during periods of war.

The core structure of the Forbidden City has three great Halls, one behind the other. The foremost and the largest is the Hall of Supreme Harmony. The Hall of Supreme Harmony rests on a three-tiered artificial terrace that forms the center of the palace. The Second is the Hall of Middle Harmony, and the last was the Hall of Preserving Harmony.

A lot of buildings roofs have yellow tiles, red walls, glided doors, vermillion colonnades, and marble balustrades. The primary structure occupies the foundation of crisscrossing bricks and clay meant to reduce the earthquake damage. The building spaces have courtyards, plazas, gardens, and parks for the Emperor are romping with the family. Feng Shu Principles made the building to face north to absorb male yang forces from the south, extending eight kilometers along the central axis of the old Beijing city (Changhong, Guo).

The imperial Rome building adopted the Greek’s columnar style, the vault, and arch from the Etruscans. The builders combined the beam, 29 domes, and column as their style of architecture. The Basilica hall was large and rectangular, its length twice longer than its width. The Basilica’s massive interior walls had aisle flanks with galleries above them.

The court officials during law sessions sat on the raised dais in a semi-circular manner. The Basilica's roof had truss instead of a dome though it still covered the large hall as the Roman craftsmen skillfully designed the truss to support the structure (Brown).The basilica was a large rectangular hall usually twice as long as it was full.

Basilicas were halls of justice and commercial marketplaces and were a place of high importance in Rome. Aisles flanked the large interior hall with galleries above the aisles. For legal purposes, the court officials sat upon a raised dais in a semi-circular apse (a circular extension of the rectangular hall). The roof of the basilica was trussed, rather than a dome, but still covered the broad expanse of the chamber due to the Roman knowledge of truss construction (Brown).

Material

Ancient Chinese displayed their skills in building the Forbidden City using wood as the principal construction materials. Builders freighted lots of vast amounts of timber and other material from far off Chinese provinces. The constructors also quarried stones from Fangshan, a Beijing suburb in China ("Stones in Beijing's Forbidden City Transported by Ice Sledge"). The Chinese builders made bricks from white lime and gluttonous rice and cement from egg whites and gluttonous rice, making the wooden walls incredibly strong.

The Forbidden City has yellow glazed tiles with yellow paintings to decorate the palace. The ground bricks have yellow pictures since yellow was the symbol of the royal family.

The ancient imperial builders used naturally occurring construction materials such as marble, stones, timber and manufactured materials such as glass, bricks and composite materials consisting of concrete.

The construction materials were readily available in the emperor near the imperial Rome and throughout Europe. The builders used manufactured materials such as concrete and bricks which allowed for extension and expansion of the Imperial Rome (Brown).Both the Imperial Rome and Forbidden City utilized wood for their construction since timber was an essential construction material.

The Imperial Rome builders used truss wood during the development of the Imperial Rome, allowing them to construct buildings with large interior spaces. An example of such a structure is the Basilica building that has the significant interior hall. The Roman imperial builders manufactured three types of bricks which included lydium, 11.65” x 5.8”, tetradoron, 11.65” x 11.65” (four hands), and pentachoron, 14.5” x 14.5” (five hands).The pentachoron size brick was most useful in the construction of large buildings and city walls where large sections which the builders could complete quickly (Brown).

Shape

Most of China’s houses and buildings are square and so is the Forbidden City and has retained the Chinese name Chinese name: Si He Yuan which means Courtyard Houses. The four walls facing the four cardinal directions define the City’s square shape. Each of Household consists of House of Middle (situated in the North), which meets the South, House of Eastern, which faces the West, and House of West, which faces the East.

The Forbidden City’ structure leaves a door on the South which opens towards the Southern part. An invisible meridian line goes through the courtyard which all houses are symmetric. From an aerial view, a viewer can tell that the geometric shape is a strict square. The square shape aligns with the shape of China’s land and thus the natural environment that determined the square shape of the Forbidden City.

Materials, methods, and architecture are ultimately visible in structures. Such shapes include the Forums which were open spaces and a central meeting point or political gatherings and communication (Brown). The markets, court jails, government facilities and public buildings surrounded the forum. The Imperial Roman temples were circular and rectangular where the rectangular temples shapes resembled the Greek style that had a portico and podium.

Location

The Forbidden City from north to south is 0.96 kilometers long and from east to west is 0.75 kilometers wide, with a circumference of three kilometers. The city consists of two parts, the Outer and the Inner Courts. The whole Forbidden City has an autonomous organization that balances with the grids and blocks with north-south and east-west orientations.

The four main gates include the Meridian Gate (Wumen) to the South, West Flowery to the west (Xihuamen), the East Flowery to the east (Donghuamen) and the Gate of Divine Prowess (Shwumen). In Imperial Rome, Rome is the Capital City of Italy and is in the central western section of the Italian Peninsula within Lazio. Despite its centralized location in Italy, the empire ruled the entire basin of Mediterranean and much of Western Europe.

Interior

The color of the emperor was yellow hence almost all roofing in the Forbidden City has yellow glaze tiles except the Pavilion Library and the Crown Prince’s. The Pavilion library had black tiles as the associated Chinese black with water hence a sign of preventing fire. The Crown Prince’s residential area was green as green symbolized wood, therefore, prosperity and growth as well as the bronze vast for decorations.

Both the Imperial Rome and the Forbidden City emperors had much value for colors and excellent finishing. The imperial builders used plastering for walls and ceilings, and paints for any applicable use. The primary paint color was blue and purple which they described as the most outstanding and loveliness in appearance (Brown).

Unlike the significant yellow color for the Forbidden City’s royalty, the colors in the Imperial Rome did not have much significance though aesthetically valuable especially purple which signified royalty (Bender, Henry V., and Ronald Mellor).

Legacy

In conclusion, bother the Forbidden City and the Imperial Rome though different in many ways have had their legacies on the world as they are both UNESCO World Heritage Sites. In both the Imperial Rome and Forbidden City, the buildings are tourist attractions sites. Christianity that started in Imperial Rome during legendary of Remus and Romulus in 750BC is the world’s widely practiced religion, the power and glory of Imperial Rome continue to impact on the modern world, influencing the art, city planning, and development. The Forbidden City continues to reveal the essence and significance of the traditional Chinese accomplishment in architectural designs that influence even the 21st-century construction and urban planning.

Work cited

"Stones in Beijing's Forbidden City Transported By Ice Sledge." Physics Today, 2013, AIP Publishing,

Bender, Henry V., and Ronald Mellor. "From Augustus to Nero: The First Dynasty of Imperial Rome." The Classical World, vol 86, no. 3, 1993, p. 241. JSTOR

Brown, G. Baldwin. “Roman Engineering Works and Their Aesthetic Character”. London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1932.

Changhong, Guo. "The Qing Palace: From A Forbidden City to a Public Heritage." Museum International, vol 60, no. 1-2, 2008, pp. 78-88. Wiley-Blackwell,