The Forbidden City: It sounds impossible but this is a city built without nails

Happy Friday folks,

It may look like a microchip from above but I promise you it’s not — it's the Forbidden City, in China, built 600 years ago.

What makes it so special?

It's said to have had exactly 9,999 rooms, not a single structure you see here was built with a nail and 40% of the Forbidden City is still forbidden…

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It's larger than the White House, Buckingham Palace, and Vatican City combined but took just 14 years to build. So the sheer scale really is impressive, but what actually is the Forbidden City?

To put it simply, it's the largest palace complex in the world. It has 90 palaces that have been home to 24 different Chinese emperors over a span of 500 years. (And it was even briefly under the control of Anglo-French forces in 1860, during the Arrow War.)

But this city didn’t just appear out of nowhere.

In fact, it has a twin.

Before Beijing, Nanjing was China’s capital. When Emperor Yongle seized power in 1402, he relocated the capital north and built a new palace in Beijing, mirroring the previous one’s design. It would take the work of over a million people and over 14 years to complete this new complex in 1420.

Its Chinese name tells us another part of the story. From the Forbidden City (or “Zijin Cheng), we get “Zi,” which means the North Star, referencing the emperor being at the center of the universe, and “Jin,” meaning forbidden; hence, for 500 years, the only people that could were the emperor, his family, and some very close friends.

Numbers held profound meaning in the Forbidden City and Chinese culture, and none more so than nine, which was favored by the Emperor as it represented good fortune. There were 9 rows of nails on the palace doors. There were 9 houses on each side of the Tiananmen towers. And there was the 9 Dragon Wall.

Even the roofs had this numerical symbolism. The Hall of Supreme Harmony, the most important structure in the Forbidden City, boasted 10 mythical sculptures on its roof, a number reserved for something otherworldly, perfection that was unattainable in this life.

Something else worthy of noting is that the Hall of Supreme Harmony alone features an impressive 13,433 individual dragon ornaments.

Legend says that the Forbidden City originally had 9,999 rooms, just shy of the divine 10,000 reserved for heaven. In truth, many parts of the city have been lost over the centuries, so we don't really know for certain if that was true.

Today, 8,886 rooms remain.

But the construction of the palace might be just as interesting. Huge 200-ton rocks were needed to construct the Hall of Preserving Harmony, which would take months to transport from 80 km away.

But engineers had a clever way of dealing with this because it could only be done in winter…

Hundreds, if not thousands, of wells were dug up, and water was poured onto the road. After the water froze, wooden bars were used to slide the rock all the way to Beijing. This way, it would take just 50 (rather than 1,500) people and 28 days to move to the Forbidden City.

And if it couldn’t get any better, you won’t find a single nail in sight in this city: it was all built using interlocking wooden brackets through a technique called dougong.

But what is even more remarkable is what lies hidden in plain sight—the 100 million "golden" floor tiles in the Forbidden City. A single brick costs the equivalent of 750 kg of rice, so how could any empire possibly afford this?

Well, they actually weren't made of gold; they were referring to the sheer amount of time invested in making them. It would take 2 to 3 years and 29 procedures to make just one brick.

And the emperor would choose the best ones; the rest were completely destroyed...

Something else that is interesting: note the color that is used for the palace roofs. It's yellow, linking to "earth" in the Five Phases (of Chinese Philosophy), symbolizing that the Emperor is the commander of his kingdom and the world.

This same concept is present in the Wenyuan Pavilion, a grand library that once housed the largest collection of literature in ancient China. It was painted black, associated with water, that would protect it against being burned down. The pavilion was destroyed in 1860; today only ruins remain.

But there's another part, which at first may seem normal, but it's extraordinary—and out of place... This is Yude Hall, and it bears the unmistakable mark of Arabic influence. Originally, it was a bathhouse. Later, it steamed special paper for the emperors’ calligraphy.

Designed by a Persian architect, Yude Hall boasts an arched dome and walls lined with white glazed tiles—features very much uncommon in traditional Chinese architecture.

There was even a European-styled building—Lingzhao Xuan. However, the project’s timing was ill-fated. Financial constraints and political turmoil during the late Qing era brought construction to a halt, leaving the building as a symbol of unfulfilled ambition.

But this is an incredible example of how different civilizations managed to influence the Forbidden City.

Locked away, hiding treasures, yet still connected to the outside world through culture, history, and architecture.

(and not as a microchip…)

Until Next Time,

World Scholar