In the late night of December 15, the fourteenth year of Guangxu (1888), the wind was howling, the cold was bone-chilling, and the night was quiet, and no one expected a palace fire to occur at this time. Suddenly, I saw the flames in the Forbidden City, the smoke filled the sky, and the voices of people boiling. This fire is the famous Zhendumen fire case in the Qing Dynasty.
Zhendu Gate is located in the south of the Middle Road in the Forbidden City, bordering Taihe Gate to the east, Chonglou Tower to the west, and Hongyi Pavilion to the north. Zhendu Gate, called Xuanzhi Gate in the Ming Dynasty, was also called Xijiao Gate before it was called Xuanzhi Gate. In the Qing Dynasty, the Zhendu Gate was the door where officials often entered and exited the dynasty, and the box rooms on the left and right sides of the door were the places where the guards and officers were on duty.
Chastity Gate
Zhendu Gate is located in Yaochong, and to the east of it, the Taihe Gate is the place where the emperor's imperial gate listens to the government or holds major ceremonies. Further to the east is the Zhaode Gate, which is also the gate where officials often come and go when they go to the dynasty.
There are also many warehouses connected near the Zhendu Gate, such as the satin warehouse, the jia library, the felt warehouse, and the saddle warehouse on the east side of the Taihe Gate. The row of boxes on the west side is a silver warehouse, a leather library, a porcelain warehouse, a clothing warehouse, and a tea warehouse. These warehouses stored important utensils for the royal court and were forbidden places in the palace. Therefore, the security guards in this area are very tight, and there are officers and soldiers guarding and patrolling day and night.
A fire broke out at the Zhendu Gate, causing great panic in the Qing court. When the fire broke out, officials, princes and nobles, as well as soldiers and miscellaneous servants of various battalions, all rushed to put out the fire, and it is said that more than 7,000 people attended the scene.
The Guangxu Emperor's teacher, Weng Tonggong, who also participated in firefighting, gave a detailed and vivid description of the fire and the situation in his diary:
At that time, there was a strong wind at night, and it did not stop until five o'clock. Usually I woke up early in the morning, but I couldn't wake up on this day. The servant hurriedly called me up and said, "Ouchi is on fire," and then said, "The Gate of The Sadaru." Hurriedly got up, got into the car and entered the palace, only to learn that it was the Zhendu Gate that was on fire. Entering the palace from the left gate, the ground is snowy, and it is difficult to walk on foot. By the time we got to the Zhendu Gate, the three eaves on the door had collapsed, and the walls and columns were still burning. I, Fugong, Qingdi, and others all said, "It is advisable to cut off the fire route," but no one paid any attention to it.
To the west of zhendumen is Piku and to the east is the tea storehouse. At this time, Piku had opened the door and lit the lantern. The tea storehouse is still tightly closed, but the fire has burned into the library, and people don't know it yet.
Walk out of the Taihe Gate to see the water under the Jinshui Bridge chiseled a foot to take a very shallow layer of water, and it is not easy to take water with a machine. I went to the chaofang to sit for a while, at this time the fire had burned through the teahouse, burned the Taihe Gate, hurriedly took a closer look, the Taihe Gate was flaming on all sides, how fast the fire was! Manpower was difficult to use, and water was scarce, and after a while, the fire went over the Taihe Gate and burned eastward, burning the five felt houses of the WubeiYuan and burning the Zhaode Gate to the east.
At this time, people wanted to tear down the house on the east side of Zhaodemen, but the house was strong and could not be pushed, and it could not be pulled down by sawing and cutting with a saw axe. So it was said that the craftsmen had demolished the first two rooms in the east, and it took two hours to pull down the beams, and there were nearly ten injured people.
The fire burned to the Zhaode Gate, and suddenly the circle no longer rushed eastward, and the people who demolished the house took the opportunity to do it, otherwise they would all burn out.
Zhaodemen
I went back to the room and sat down. Watch the fire again, and the fire will not decrease. When the time came, he drove home to eat, and after the meal, he entered the palace, the house had been demolished three times, the fire channel had been cut off, the pillars were still on fire, and the embers were still burning. The fire remained unquenchable until the seventeenth day, burning everywhere, and the bricks and stones burned red.
After two days of fighting, the fire was finally extinguished. Due to the ruin of the fire fighting organization at that time, the backward facilities, the incomplete equipment, the lack of water sources, the low efficiency of fighting, and the uncontrollable fire, the fire spread rapidly, so that most of the zhendumen, Taihemen, Zhaodemen and nearby warehouses were reduced to ashes, forming a huge disaster.
What was the cause of this fire?
After the fire, the Punishment Department interrogated the officers and men on duty at the Zhendu Gate, and learned that on December 14, Baoshan, the officer of the GuardIng Army, took ten escorts to take over at the West Daku, and by the night of the fifteenth, Baoshan and eight guards sat in the felt shed outside the treasury to guard at night, and the other two guards, Toyama and Shuangkui, stayed in the Zhendu Gate Cover due to their old age and stayed in the Zhendu Gate Cover to guard the locks.
The original foreign iron oil lamp, hung on the eaves of the east gable of the door cover, this lamp has been used for a long time, there is a scorching situation, and it has always been lit at night. That night, Toyama and Shuangkui still lit the lights and did not sleep soundly. At the time of the fourth change, a guard patrol found that the pillar of the east gable of the Zhendu Gate was on fire, and hurriedly called out Toyama and Shuangkui to fight it, and the fire was even fiercer, and finally it burned up.
The direct damage caused by this fire was the destruction of all the buildings such as Zhendu Gate, Taihe Gate and Zhaode Gate. The nearby warehouses were burned, including five felt warehouses, all piku, and all tea warehouses. The burning of the three gates of Zhendu, Taihe, and Zhaode is difficult to estimate. As for the libraries and their stored utensils, how much has been lost, their value cannot be estimated.
After the three gates of Taihe, Zhendu, and Zhaode were burned, they needed to be rebuilt. The project requires a lot of wood, stone, bricks, copper and iron workpieces and oil jewelry, and the quality requirements are high and the texture is good.
The Taihe Gate is 21.7 meters high, the Zhaode and Zhendu gates are 14.8 meters high, and the required wood, the middle column is 14.98 meters high, and the golden pillar is 12.4 meters high, and the diameter needs to be 73 centimeters. The Taihe Gate Pedestal was originally built of Nan wood, and the rest were made of yellow pine. Nan wood is produced in Hunan and Sichuan, and it is very rare to grow large wood, and it is difficult to procure, and it takes time to transport and solve. Therefore, it is proposed to replace the large wood used in the golden pillar and the purlin to yellow pine, the corner beam bucket is made of cypress wood, and the rhombus flower, window drawer and treasure vase are all made of basswood. Most of these woods are purchased and transported from Yun, Gui, Xiang, Gansu and other provinces, and the time and manpower and freight required are also considerable. The stone materials required for the project, the pillar top stone is still used with the old cornerstone, the old stone is flattened, and the stone foundation is added, and no new stone is replaced. For stones such as railings and strips, only 30% of the old survivors are retained, and the remaining 70% need to be added to the new stones. The bricks and tiles required for the project are divided into three types: Haiyuan gold bricks, which are manufactured and operated by Jiangsu, and the bricks and tiles used in the wall are burned by Tangquan, and the rest are made of old city bricks. In short, the reconstruction project will require more than 235,000 silver.
In addition, in order to reward the firefighters, more than 25,000 taels of silver were used, and more than 13,900 taels of silver were used to repair the fire squad duty room and purchase fire fighting equipment, all of which were considered to be accidental costs caused by the fire.
When the Taihe Gate caught fire, it was just as the Guangxu Emperor was preparing for the big wedding. The great wedding ceremony was scheduled to be held on the twenty-seventh day of the first month of the fifteenth year of Guangxu, and only one month after the big wedding, the Taihe Gate was burned down, which was a great misfortune for the emperor's big wedding. According to the etiquette of the time, it must be remedied in any case. However, the wedding date was imminent, and it was too late to rebuild as it was, so the craftsmen had to temporarily build a color shed at the original door for emergency use. According to the records of the time, this painted coffin is no different from the original appearance of the Taihe Gate, and even the size, carving, tile grooves and all other details are tied according to the original door. The color shed is more than thirty-three meters high, very strong, the cold wind blows it also does not move, even if the people who have been serving in the palace for a long time, when they see the color shed, they can't tell whether it is really Taihe Gate or fake color shed.
Taihe Gate Color Shed and Guangxu Wedding
This fire, for the emperor, was a spiritual blow, which was not unpleasant, so the perpetrators of the fire were severely punished. On the third day after the fire, Guangxu ordered that all Zhang Jing and the guards on duty today did not care to guard the forbidden city, which was really hateful, and all of them were taken to the Punishment Department for strict interrogation and convicted according to the law. After receiving the order, the Punishment Department sentenced Baoshan and ten other people to death, and Fu Kun, Si Quan, and other ministers in charge of internal affairs who had management responsibilities were also given demotion or punishment for their negligence in preventing them.
In addition, within eight or nine days, Guangxu issued more than a dozen edicts one after another, making arrangements one by one on rewarding fire-fighting personnel, rectifying fire fighting institutions, re-inspecting fire prevention regulations, and surveying and re-repairing the Taihe Gate, hoping that the relevant personnel would punish those who had been punished before and after, so as to overcome disasters and usher in peace. However, until the end of the Qing Dynasty, large and small fires in the court still occurred from time to time, and although Guangxu tried his best to rectify it, he was unable to completely save it.