In the fourth year of Yongle (1406 AD), Zhu Di, the ancestor of the Ming Dynasty, issued an edict to build a new palace in Beijing, and began to send ministers from various parties to prepare building materials throughout the country, cut down forests, mine large stones, and dig deep soil...
In the fifteenth year of Yongle, more than one million people concentrated on a large scale to build the Forbidden City;
In November of the eighteenth year of Yongle, the Forbidden City was officially completed.
Since then, the Forbidden City has stood quietly in the rain, snow, wind and frost for more than 600 years, and in the face of this magnificent and majestic palace complex, I can't help but ask: Why did the Yongle Emperor choose to build his palace here? How did the people at that time realize the emperor's vision with hardworking and wise hands?
紫禁城·位置
Beijing, known as Yanjing during the Yuan Dynasty, was the seat of the Yuan capital (i.e., the imperial capital), where the Yuan Dynasty built urban projects such as palaces, altars, city walls, and rivers.
After Zhu Yuanzhang founded the Ming Dynasty, the capital was Nanjing, and Yanjing became the domain of Zhu Di the King of Yan, in order to save construction costs, Zhu Yuanzhang granted Zhu Di permission to use the old palace of Yuan as the Yan King Mansion, and later the location of the Forbidden City is closely related to the Yan King Mansion, since this is the case, then let's first talk about the Yuan Inner Palace and the Yan King Mansion.
Around the thirteenth to fourteenth year of Yongle, when the construction of the Forbidden City was in full swing, Xiao Xun was ordered to Beijing to demolish the Inner Imperial Palace of the Yuanda, and he wrote a convincing reference work for posterity and very important for the study of the Yuanda, "The Testament of the Forbidden City".
In this book, Xiao Xun clearly pointed out that the imperial palace of the Yuan Dynasty was built closely around the Tailiu Pond (present-day Zhongnanhai and Beihai) near the water, and the east bank was the three main halls with the eleven-wide Daming Hall as the main hall, which was the residence of the emperor and the place where he exercised his political rights; To the south of the west bank is Longfu Palace, where the prince lives, and to the north is the Xingsheng Palace, where the queen lives, and the main halls of both palaces are seven rooms wide.
After Zhu Di took over the old Yuan Palace, he transformed the original three halls on the east bank into the three halls of the Yan King Mansion, and it was precisely because the main hall of the Yan King Mansion inherited the eleven broad regulations that only the emperor deserved to enjoy, and after Emperor Jianwen ascended the throne, he convicted Zhu Di of the crime of "trespassing", and wanted to cut off his domain with this, but Zhu Di responded dignifiedly:
“此乃皇考所赐...... Not a single loss... Yan Yin Yuan old. ”
This response preserved in the historical records also directly points out the location of the Yan King Mansion, that is, where the three major halls in the original Yuan Dynasty are located.
When the Yuan Palace was later demolished, Zhu Di requested that the Yan Palace be preserved as much as possible, and in order to take into account the emperor's ideas and the overall layout of the new hall, the central axis of the new hall was shifted to the east to the position of the central axis of today's Forbidden City, because the west of the Yan Palace was the Tailiu Pond, which could not be integrated with the design plan of the Forbidden City.
In today's Forbidden City, the West Road Cining Palace is the location of the main hall of the original Yan King Mansion, and the Rainbow Bridge east of the Wuying Hall is the one on the east side of the three Jinshui Bridges of the original Yan King Mansion.
紫禁城·营建
1. Preparation
As mentioned earlier, before the official construction of the palace, the relevant personnel spent 11 years of preparation, and the preparation that took so long mainly included the preparation, transportation and storage of wood, stone, bricks, tiles, etc.
Let's start with wood.
For example, most of the Nanmu needed for the construction of the Forbidden City comes from the deep mountains and old forests of Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, Sichuan and other places, which are not only overhanging mountains, but also many snakes, insects, rats, ants, and miasma.
After painstakingly dragging the wood to the water's edge, the workers would group it into rafts, wait until the rainy season water rises, and then push it into the river, and transport it along the various water systems to the Shenmu Factory outside Beijing's Chongwen Gate (the wood circumference is more than five feet long called "Shenmu") and the large wood factory outside Chaoyangmen, a distance of several thousand kilometers, ranging from as little as one year to as many as three or four years.
Nanmu in the temple
Let's take a look at the stone.
Like the 16.57-meter-long and 3.07-meter-wide "Yunlong Stone Steps" behind the Bohol Hall, the railing in front of the Qin'an Hall in the Royal Garden, etc., the white jade needed to be used mostly comes from Fangshan Dashiwo Village and Mentougou in the southwestern suburbs of Beijing, and other ordinary granite is mostly taken from Quyang, Hebei.
In order to get hundreds of tons of stones to arrive, workers would build wells along the road in advance, and then take advantage of the cold winter to splash water into ice and walk on the ice with screws pulling dry boats carrying stones. It is said that the "Yunlong Stone Steps" used more than 20,000 people and more than 2,000 screws and horses in this way, and it took 28 days to transport it to the Forbidden City.
Yunlong stone steps
Let's talk about bricks.
The tens of millions of bricks in the Forbidden City are roughly divided into city bricks, tiles and gold bricks, mostly from Linqing in Shandong and Lumu in Jiangsu, and the "golden bricks" fired by Lumu imperial kiln are the most rare.
Golden bricks are large fine square bricks. Its texture is hard, lustrous as ink jade, not slippery or astringent on the step, from soil extraction to kiln, there are a total of seven major processes, before and after to add up to 2 years, and the loss in the production process is very large, a batch of mud into the mold, and finally only 20% of the pass rate.
It is also because the gold brick is so expensive, so its transportation, storage and use are extremely strictly managed, and each gold brick in the Forbidden City will be clearly engraved on the back or next to the name of the god king, the production time, the name of the craftsman, the size and other information to prevent loss and forgery.
The gold bricks in the Hall of Taihe
Let's look at the tiles again.
The Forbidden City is mostly covered with yellow glazed tiles made by the Liuli Factory outside the Xuanwu Gate (moved to the suburban Liuliqu Village during the Qianlong period), and only a small number of palaces use green tiles from the black kiln factory.
The brilliant glazed tiles will show different colors such as yellow, blue, and green due to the different metal oxides contained in the glaze. Compared with the huge and complex wood and stone materials, the preparation and transportation of glazed tiles are relatively easy.
2. Construction
We know that today's Forbidden City in Beijing is 961 meters long from north to south and 753 meters wide from east to west, with more than 9,000 large and small rooms, and more than 100,000 craftsmen and nearly one million laborers participated in it.
1. Thanks to the advanced and standardized "material division system" of ancient architecture in the mainland.
Timber is the reference unit for measuring the size of each component in timber construction. It is based on the cross-sectional size of each roof bucket arch as "one material", divided into "eighth grade material" or "eleventh class material", each grade is a kind of bucket mouth size, with this size, the height of the house, the depth, the number of beams, columns, etc. required can be known, so that the prefabricated parts of each component can be made in advance in the material processing plant, only to be brought to the site to assemble, which greatly shortens the construction period.
2. Thanks to the wisdom of the ancients in the mortise and tenon technology.
mortise is the protruding part of the wooden member; 卯, is the recessed part. The mortise and tenon bite each other, connect and support, perfectly combine the points, lines and surfaces of the building, which is not only stable and earthquake-resistant, but also improves the construction efficiency with quality and quantity.
As the culminator of this wisdom, the countless tenon and tenon prefabricated parts in the Forbidden City are like the building blocks we now build, stacked layer by layer in an orderly manner, and in only three years, the splendid and indestructible Son of Heaven City was built.
How strong is it?
In the documentary "Secrets of the Forbidden City" shot by a British media, the architects made a model of Shoukang Palace at a scale of 1:5 for seismic testing, and the results surprised the British - after shaking for 30 seconds at 10.1 on the Richter scale, the model actually stood there steadily, without collapsing, not falling apart, but only slightly displaced!
3. Benefit from the scientific organization and orderly connection between different processes.
According to the different types of work, there were mainly "eight major works" at that time, which were:
Woodwork: divided into large wood work and small wooden work, large wooden work is responsible for the production and installation of large components such as bucket arches, beams, fangs, etc., its frame size is the production standard of other craftsmen, and such as furniture, decoration and so on is the work of small wood;
Stone work: responsible for the production, processing and installation of stone steps, stone foundations, stone pillars, etc.;
Tiles: In addition to the laying of the roof, it also includes floor tiles, wall building, preparation of plaster and mud, etc.;
Soil work: construction of excavation, rammed earth and filling soil;
Oil work: in order to protect and decorate wood components, paint the surface of wood;
Constructing materials: equivalent to the current scaffolding, you need to participate in the whole process of project construction;
Color paintings: drawing patterns and patterns that highlight the grade on the surface of wood;
Pasting: Using paper to mount, decorate indoor doors, windows, walls, ceilings, etc., is the last process.
In the traditional architecture with brick and wood structure as the main body, wood, stone, tile are the main craftsmanship, of which wood work is the most important, it is not only to complete the task of the work, but also responsible for the connection and cooperation of each work.
小结语
It can be said that in the 600-year-old Forbidden City, brick by brick, stone and wood, all have their own stories, if this article can give you a brief understanding, I believe that the next time you go to the Forbidden City and meet them again, it will make you have different novel feelings!
#头条创作挑战赛 #