Beijing City
4 min readThe present-day Beijing City was initially built in the Yuan Dynasty. It got the current form in the Ming Dynasty. It has grand towers and pavilions, magnificent palaces and halls, crossed streets and avenues, interlaced lanes, as well as starstudded quadrangles. Important cultural relics, such as the Forbidden City , the Imperial Ancestral Temple, the Temple of Heaven and so on, could be seen everywhere. It lives up to its name as a world-known city of history and culture. The most prominent feature of the overall layout of Beijing City is an “axis” going through the whole city. This axis starts from the Yongding Gate in the south and ends at the Drum Tower and Bell Tower in the north. Its whole length reaches 7.5 kilometers. The axis strings a series of tall, grand, magnif cent and luxurious royal palaces and pavilions as well as the landmarks of the city. It artfully highlights the core place of the Forbidden City and fully shows the idea of “Superior Imperial Power” and the Chinese traditional social structure with the emperor as the core.
The embrasure watchtower of Zhengyang Gate was initially built in the middle period of the Ming Dynasty . During the reign of Emperor Kangxi of the Qing Dynasty, it was rebuilt because of an earthquake. In 1900 it was destroyed by the Eight-Power Allied Troops before being rebuilt again in 1906. The embrasure watchtower is a wooden structure with a four-layer double-eave gablet roof. Its plane takes the shape of an inverted T. The exterior wall is covered with blue bricks and thus looks stable and solid. A lot of square holes for shooting arrows are opened in the wall, displaying the features of a military structure.
The Evolution of Beijing City
The court of the Liao Dynasty built “Nanjing” based on Youzhou City from the Tang and Five Dynasties as its auxiliary capital. In history it was called the Nanjing of the Liao Dynasty. At that time, the scale of Beijing City was far smaller than later. The Nanjing of the Liao Dynasty was expanded in the Jin Dynasty and upgraded into a capital (named “Zhongdu”). The Beijing City got a very big size in the Yuan Dynasty (named “Khanbaliq”). Yiheidie’erding, an architect of the Hui people from Western Regions, took char ge of the initial design and construction. During the construction, the city was not built on the old site of Zhongdu from the Jin Dynasty. Instead, a new city was built. The royal city was located in the area south of the city center . Cannels were dug to make full use of the water system, solving the problem of transporting goods from South China to Khanbaliq. People in the Ming Dynasty inherited the layout of Khanbaliq from the Yuan Dynasty and expanded the Beijing City on the basis of it. The expansion was divided into three phases. In the f rst phase the royal city from the Yuan Dynasty was removed and the north city wall of Khanbaliq was moved southward by 2.5 kilometers. Then the palace was enlar ged and the south city wall was moved southward to the current line of Front Gate, Chongwen Gate and Xuanwu Gate of Beijing City .
The Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Imperial Ancestral Temple and other important constructions were built too. Eventually, a circle of outer city was built to the south of the city , forming the special inverted-T-shaped plane of the Beijing City.
Turrets are built in the southeastern and southwestern parts of the inner city. The royal city is 2500 meters long from east to west and 2750 meters long from south to north. It is located in the area south of the city center . The gate facing due south is the Tian’anmen. The royal city is surrounded by residential districts, which are rectangular areas of dwellings divided by lanes. The commercial area of Beijing in the Qing Dynasty was mainly in the south city. A lot of temples and monasteries are scattered inside and outside the city. The southern side of the inner city has three doors while each of the other three sides has two gates. Each gate is equipped with towers above gates and embrasure towers. The plane of the entire city takes the shape of an inverted T.
Rites of Zhou – the Records of Examination of Craftsman and the Fundamental Layout of Beijing City
The classic book Rites of Zhou – the Records of Examination of Craftsman , which was written at the end of the Spring and Autumn Period, records and describes some important architectural elements in the Western Zhou Dynasty. The planning and design of Khanbaliq were closely related with this Confucian classic book. For example, its square plane, regular and orderly square grid-like road system, the position of market area behind the royal city and other patterns of layout tallied with the ideal blueprint of building a capital city in the Rites of Zhou – the Records of Examination of Craftsman.
