The City Wall and the Corner Towers

The Forbidden City in Beijing is one of the most imposing and awe-inspiring architectural structures in the world.

Construction of the Forbidden City began in 1405 during the fourth year of the third Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) Emperor Yongle’s reign. It was completed in 1420.

A million workers, 100 thousand artisans and materials from all over the Middle Kingdom were dedicated to the construction of the imperial complex. The architectural significance of the complex resides in its over-all design and in specific buildings or structures such as the city wall and the corner towers.

The Forbidden City’s walls, both internal and external, but especially the latter, though not as dazzling as the palaces and halls, frame the main structure and were more grandiose than that of Beijing’s city walls at that time. The outer wall was and is rectangular, with two parallel, 960-metre-long, north-south walls and two 760-metre-long east-west walls. It is 9.9-metres high with a base that is 8.62 metres wide and a top that is 6.66-metres wide. The angular shape of the wall frustrates attempts to climb it.

As many as 10 million bricks were used in construction of the Forbidden City, most of which were made during the Ming Dynasty. Each brick is 0.48 metres long, 0.24 metres wide, 0.12 metres high and they weigh 24 kilograms. The bricks were mainly produced in Linqing, Shandong Province, which was said to have the best soil and most convenient waterways for transportation.

Inside the Forbidden City’s walls there are four corner towers. Legend has it that the emperor gave craftsmen only nine days to design the corner towers, but after eight days thought, the craftsmen found themselves bereft of ideas. The craftsmen were sitting in a teahouse hoping for an idea when a man they thought was an old peddler trying to sell a cricket cage approached them. They tried to repulse the “peddler” and send him away, but he smiled and said, "Look closely; this is not ordinary cricketcage." The craftsmen realized what the old peddler was showing them was a finely crafted structure with 9 beams, 18 columns and 72 ridges. The peddler was actually the master craftsman Lu Ban, who had become an immortal, so the craftsmen created the corner towers using the cricketcage as a model and thus added something new to the world’s architectural heritage.

The corner towers are of an unusual design because of their legendary origins but also because of their apparent lack of functionality. Most ancient towers in Beijing had ports designed to allow the shooting of arrows, as with the Arrow Towers on each city gate, but the corner towers were built for appreciation only. When viewing the towers from outside the Forbidden City’s 52-metre-wide moat, you can see the yellow and red buildings soaring into the blue sky, indicating that the Forbidden City was a heavenly dwelling for the sons of god – the emperors.

Among other special features are the animal ornaments that decorate the corners of the roofs of these and other imperial buildings. In Chinese imperial architecture the more animals there are on these roofs, the more important the building is. The No. 1 building inside the Forbidden City is the Hall of Supreme Harmony, which has 114 such ornaments, while the each of the corner towers has 230 animal ornaments, which hints at how important the corner towers were to those who had them built.