The Forbidden City (Wonders of the World) (Hardcover)

~ Geremie R. Barmé (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Barme presents a vivid and compelling portrait of this extraordinary attraction, which encapsulates much of the country's history, from imperial China through to communism and the forthcoming Olympics.
--Clover Stroud (Sunday Telegraph 20080223)

A prime site, in Beijing, is the Forbidden City, a walled palace founded in the 15th century by Ming emperors and later elaborated by emperors of the Manchu Qing dynasty. Barme describes the fabric of the palace, interpreting its history in the context of Chinese politics, psychology, religion and social conventions.
--Iain Finlayson (The Times 20080217)

This Rolls-Royce of a guidebook covers almost every conceivable physical and historical nook of the 72-hectare imperial enclave in Beijing first constructed by the 15th-century Yongle emperor, Zhu Di. Barme's history packs a veritable palace of information into its pages from the story of the sadistic Jiajing emperor, nearly strangled to death by his concubines, to the tale of the clandestine plundering of the city's treasures during the cultural revolution...Barme deftly illuminates the symmetries between the imperial court and the Communist party--whose officials took up residence in palaces outside the city. Tellingly, even as they swept the feudal past aside, neither the First Republic nor the People's Republic could bring themselves to occupy or alter the Forbidden City; Chairman Mao never set foot inside it.
--Robert Collins (Sunday Times 20080501)

Barmé has hit the mark, offering a richly detailed yet accessible thematic history of the Forbidden City, including its architecture and its inhabitants, with commentary on international perceptions of Chinese culture. He does an excellent job of providing enough background information to aid those not as well versed in Chinese history as he is while objectively presenting historical events that could be easily politicized.
--Tessa L.H. Minchew (Library Journal 20080726)

Beyond the rich contextual insights, the book also contains an excellent history of the palace with an explanation, which is truly frightening, of how it was saved from the ravages of the Cultural Revolution...Each section of the Forbidden City's vast structure is described in such a way that the book successfully fuses history with aesthetics. But always it is the deeper context that makes this book special. There are even explanations for the feng shui of certain sites in the complex. If you visit Beijing, this guide should be in your luggage.
--Bruce Elder (Sydney Morning Herald 20080731)

The Forbidden City is the latest in an excellent series from Harvard University Press...A compact volume, it is an ideal and elegant history, good for keeping in the hand while visiting the vast extraordinary complex, which has at least been preserved. Mr. Barmé, a noted Australian scholar of modern China, is as good at describing the Communists' imperially-derived impulses as he is at banishments from the medieval court. (The Economist 20080817)

Barmé's book has an ironic heart and is a carefully constructed exploration of a cultural institution that sweeps the reader along as it examines the intrigues, absurdities and grotesques of everyday life in the Forbidden City; in doing so it brings the collection of buildings to life...If you are going to the Forbidden City soon, read this book.
--Clifford Coonan (South China Morning Post 20080806)

In The Forbidden City [Barmé] brilliantly interweaves illustrative accounts from the 600-year history of the palace with broader insights into Chinese culture, its encounters with the wider world and contemporary reflections on where the country is heading. It provides a wonderful starting point on China, just as a visit to the awe-inspiring Forbidden City itself provides the perfect entrée to the country as a whole.
--Rowan Callick (The Australian )

Product Description

Read supplementary material prepared by Geremie Barmé

Read the Bldg Blog interview with Mary Beard about the Wonders of the World series (Part I and Part II)

The Forbidden City (Zijin Cheng) lying at the heart of Beijing formed the hub of the Celestial Empire for five centuries. Over the past century it has led a reduced life as the refuge for a deposed emperor, as well as a heritage museum for monarchist, republican, and socialist citizens, and it has been celebrated and excoriated as a symbol of all that was magnificent and terrible in dynastic China’s legacy.

The Forbidden City’s vermilion walls have fueled literary fantasies that have become an intrinsic part of its disputed and documented history. Mao Zedong even considered razing the entire structure to make way for the buildings of a new socialist China. The fictions surrounding the Forbidden City have also had an international reach, and writers like Franz Kafka, Elias Canetti, Jorge Luis Borges, and Mervyn Peake have all succumbed to its myths. The politics it enshrined have provided the vocabulary of power that is used in China to the present day, though it is now better known as a film set or the background of displays of opera, rock, and fashion.

Geremie Barmé peels away the veneer of power, secrecy, inscrutability, and passions of imperial China, to provide a new and original history of the culture, politics, and architecture of the Forbidden City. Designed to overawe the visitor with the power of imperial China, the Forbidden City remains one of the true wonders of the world.

(20080203)

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (May 31, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674027795
• ISBN-13: 978-0674027794
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 4.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #530,986 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A meandering book, August 21, 2008

By	Alfredo Pizzirani (Seattle, WA, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I read this book cover to cover because I am a big Beijing fan and I visit frequently. I am sorry to say that I did not find very many new facts in it - a good guidebook (for example the Blue Guide) will provide the same facts in a much more compact format.
Barme, who is a very talented academic, is at his best when he covers the debate in the Communist party about what to do with the Forbidden City and with Old Beijing; this part of the story of the Forbidden City is frequently ignored, but indeed reveals a lot about how the Chinese leadership thought in the revolutionary period.
This is a very elegant book - hardbound in cloth, printed on heavy, nicely textured paper. The pictures, unfortunately, are not up to the same standard: anything but sharp, and in black and white only; they often look like they have been reproduced from old newspapers.
There are a few interesting, even memorable, pages in this book - several pages trace one day in the life of a Qing emperor from dusk to night; I have already mentioned the discussion of the debates within the Communist leadership.
Barme is less successful when he tries to convey the mistique of the Forbidden City as it was invented by Western writers - at some point he gets completely sidetracked with a very long quotation from an unpublished memoire by a never-heard-of French writer who describes a (fictitious) sexual encounter with the Cixi Empress Dowager in much graphical detail. Exactly what how this shaped Western perceptions, since it was never published, is not clear.
The worst defect, however, is the lack of structure. The book meanders through ages, starting in Revolutionary China, backtracking the Ming, progressing on until the Republic of China, and again to the revolution (but not as linearly). It also meanders through the buildings themselves. To put it otherwise, it is not usable as a guidebook on site (there is no systematic walkthrough of the buildings, and there is very little about what the visitor will see, the description being limited to the name of the buildings and their usage through history), and it is not a coherent chronological history either.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A little secretive pleasure, September 11, 2008

By	Denise Molloy (Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If you want a big, glossy picture book of the Forbidden City don't buy this book. If you want something lovely that you'll keep forever, buy it indeed! This is the "Little Black Book" on the subject of the palace itself and so much more. It's a small, neat, lovely to handle edition whose only colour is in the red endpapers that are exactly the red of the Forbidden City's palace walls. The old, grainy, black and white photographs add to the pleasure and increase the feeling that you are getting something true and genuine instead of just another travel guide. Geremie Barme's text is erudite, as you'd expect from a Professor of Asian History, but it's also deliciously gossipy and has a pace and feeling for detail that is never boring. Professor Barme is especially good on the modern uses the Forbidden City has been put to, and his views on the Communist era are refreshingly balanced, putting Chairman Mao into the "Imperial" context very nicely. I especially loved it because it had a picture of an event I actually attended: the 1976 funeral of Chou En Lai. The shock of seeing it, just as it was, came as a delightful surprise. A lovely book. It feels Chinese.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Encylopedic & entertaining history and gossip of the Fobidden City and its meaning, May 27, 2008

By	Robert the Dirk Bogarde Fan (Canberra, Australia) - See all my reviews

This great book gives an amazing "counter-revolutionary" history of the great Forbidden City of the Chinese Emperors. You'll read how the city is seen in all sorts of manifestations, including in movies, how it was ignored in the hey day of communist china by both the government and also politically correct visitors in the 70s, how from gradual openings in the late 70s to how you can barely find a quite spot. Another point: its a very large city, both in size, grandeur, history and importance. Lots of great photographs populate the American edition.