ABSTRACT
The Palace City or the Purple Forbidden City was a large, horizontally expansive, architecture complex at the centre of Beijing. In a rectangular shape on a north—south axis, it measured 961 metres north to south and 753 metres east to west, covering an area of about 723,600 square metres. For five centuries, from 1420 to 1911, fourteen emperors of the Ming and ten of the Qing lived here, ruling the Chinese empire from within this deep centre.
