Even those who have not come to Beijing to personally visit the Forbidden City have heard the name of the Forbidden City, which was the residence and office of the emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and became a museum after the founding of New China. What many people don't know is that the building of the Forbidden City is a cultural relic in itself.
Especially with the explosion of Qing Palace dramas, the Forbidden City has also become a place for many young people to punch cards. Many people have heard of an unwritten rule in the Forbidden City that must be cleared at 5 p.m. As for the reason for the 5-point clearance, many people were misled after watching the Qing Palace drama and thought that it was some supernatural legend. In fact, this is a lesson from 62 years ago.
Clearance of the Forbidden City
People who visit the Forbidden City know that the Forbidden City is closed on Mondays, and other days also have prescribed opening hours, and some special days need to be temporarily notified. The Forbidden City opens in autumn, winter, spring and summer, and the peak tourist season is from April to November of that year.
If you encounter holidays such as May 1 and 10,000, the number of receptions can reach 80,000 per day. However, regardless of the number of receptions per day, the Forbidden City conducts a carpet-style inventory every day before closing. The general spring and summer time is 5 pm, and the autumn and winter will be half an hour earlier.
Folk legends about this matter are various, most of them are related to some supernatural stories, and some people regard the stories compiled in some film and television dramas as history without consciously having a sense of substitution, and even have such absurd statements as "yin soldiers borrowing the way".
People who believe in these statements are often influenced by film and television works, especially some palace fighting dramas, which leads many people to believe that the emperor, empress and harem concubines all have the power of life and death, and the eunuch palace women can be deprived of their lives at will. However, as long as you go to a little research, you can know that this is basically a fabrication of the TV series.
In the feudal era, there was indeed no human rights for palace women and eunuchs, but the palace women and eunuchs in the Forbidden City were registered, and it was absolutely impossible to disappear a person inexplicably. The number of concubines of different ranks is also stipulated, and unlike the TV drama, the queen concubine can arbitrarily deprive others of their lives as long as they give an order.
According to the historical data of the Ming and Qing dynasties, a conclusion is that the Forbidden City does not have any supernatural events, so why does the Forbidden City carry out carpet clearance at 5 pm every day? In fact, this is related to a lesson from 62 years ago, what happened 62 years ago?
Artifacts were stolen
The reason why the Forbidden City has an unwritten rule to carry out carpet clearance after 5 o'clock every day stems from a theft case 62 years ago. One day in August 1959, during the sweltering summer heat, the staff arrived early in the morning to prepare for the exhibition work.
However, when the staff arrived at the treasure house to open the door to welcome visitors from all directions, they found a hole in a glass cabinet where the treasure was placed. The area of this hole is not small, the staff's vigilance was immediately filled, and then the staff speculated that it was likely to have suffered theft and quickly reported the case to the Beijing police.
At the same time, the relevant staff also informed their superiors, and then carried out the verification of cultural relics, and finally found that eight pages of the gold album listed in the exhibition were missing, and five treasure swords as cultural relics were also lost, and these swords were either inlaid with gold or gemstones, which were not only expensive but also of high archaeological value.
This time is not a simple theft case, so many cultural relics were lost at once, and the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau attaches great importance to dispatching elite police forces to investigate. However, 62 years ago, the investigation methods were not as advanced as they are now, and if the suspects fled to other provinces by public transportation, it would increase the difficulty of tracing.
In order to protect the country's precious cultural relics, the relevant leaders of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau reported the situation and requested the sister provinces to help investigate. However, the clues were cut off for a while, until more than three months later, on a train bound for Beijing, the police found a suspicious person.
The passenger was suspicious because he was carrying some broken gold nuggets, the shape of which caught the attention of the police. So the police asked the bearer of the gold nugget about its origin, but the passenger named Wu Qinghui looked around and said that he could not explain the detailed origin of the gold nugget.
The investigators in the back found the gold nuggets when they carefully examined them, and the inscriptions could be faintly seen. Wu Qinghui was also controlled because of the suspicion of major crimes, and then the police on the train reported the details to the Beijing police, and the Beijing police found that it was this person named Wu Qinghui who entered the Forbidden City and stole relevant cultural relics after detailed comparison.
Lessons from 62 years ago
After being controlled by the police, Wu Qinghui explained in detail his crime at that time. Wu Qinghui, who visited the Forbidden City for the first time, had different ideas from others, most people were impressed by the grandeur of the Forbidden City, and Wu Qinghui suddenly had the evil intention of stealing these jewels and selling them for money after seeing the treasures of the real capillaries.
It was summer, and the nights in Beijing were not cold. Wu Qinghui first entered the Forbidden City in early August, and after Wu Qinghui had other ideas, he bought a ticket to enter the Forbidden City again in the middle of that month. At that time, Wu Qinghui entered the Forbidden City and arrived at the Treasure Hall at about 3:00 p.m.
When the Forbidden City was about to close in the evening, Wu Qinghui did not leave the Forbidden City like other tourists but hid in a toilet near the Treasure Museum. Because the Forbidden City did not have the habit of checking the number of people in that era, the staff did not expect that someone would hide in the toilet and wait for the opportunity to attack the cultural relics in the Forbidden City, so Wu Qinghui hid in the toilet until night.
According to Wu Qinghui's own account, he waited in the toilet for all the personnel to leave the Forbidden City and then broke the door to sneak into the treasure hall to steal the treasure that he had already taken a fancy to, and at the gate he took advantage of the guards to chat with other personnel and secretly ran over the wall with the treasure. Subsequently, Wu Qinghui went to many places to sell the stolen cultural relics, and sold a total of more than a thousand yuan.
1,000 yuan was a huge fortune at that time. At that time, the average person's monthly salary was more than ten yuan. However, the paper package could not hold the fire, and eventually Wu Qinghui, who had the East Window Incident, was also captured. Wu Jinhui was sentenced to death, and Wu Qinghui's third sister knew that her brother had stolen cultural relics from the Forbidden City but did not report it, and was caught and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
summary
In addition to the theft of the Forbidden City in 1959, from 1962 to 2011, there were several thefts of cultural relics from the Forbidden City, but these thefts did not succeed in the end. Especially after the theft of cultural relics in 1959, the Forbidden City strengthened security measures.
Today, the cultural relics of the Forbidden City are very safe, not only do they have ubiquitous electronic cameras working 24 hours a day, until now the Forbidden City still insists on carpet clearance after 5 o'clock every day to prevent the recurrence of similar incidents 62 years ago.