People who have been to the Forbidden City will find that there is not a street lamp in the vast Forbidden City, so why is the Forbidden City uneasy about the street lamp, was it not installed at the beginning? What lighting was used in the past?
In fact, when the Forbidden City was first built, the main road was equipped with copper street lamps, which were very exquisite, with a white jade stone seat at the bottom and a four-pillar square pavilion with a copper heavy eaves on the top, and the pavilion was inlaid with glass on all sides. This kind of street lamp is lit every day, and it is extinguished after dawn, and the eunuch is specially responsible for adding oil to the street lamp and lighting it, and patrolling it at any time. But then why didn't it?
The copper street lamps in the Forbidden City have undergone two disasters, one is that the eunuch Wei Zhongxian at the end of the Ming Dynasty took advantage of the faint incompetence of Emperor Ming Xizong to take over the power, do no evil, and do nothing wrong in the Forbidden Palace, in order to facilitate the convenience of entering and leaving the palace at night, he abolished the copper street lamp on the grounds of "cautious use of fire candles". Since then, the Ming Dynasty has not set up street lamps. In the Qing Dynasty, due to the Ming system, street lamps were rarely added.
Another disaster was that during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, in order to loot arms resources, the Japanese invading forces demolished all the copper street lamps in the forbidden city's open area and loaded them into trucks to transport them away. Fortunately, the demolished copper lamps were transported to the Tianjin port, just when the Japanese invaders announced unconditional surrender, and the street lamps returned to the Forbidden City, but they have not been installed again.