ABSTRACT
Let us now observe scenes of political life unfolding at the imperial court in Beijing. We will focus on the early and mid-Qing dynasty, but will also make reference to the Ming and the late Qing. We will pay attention to sites and trajectories of all significant social agents that, as political forces, operated within and around the court at the centre of Beijing. We will search for spatial configurations of these forces, relations among them, structural patterns within the relations, and ways in which these forces and their relations were supported in the architecture of the Forbidden City and the urban fabric of the surrounding areas. In this chapter, we will observe the static ‘composition’ of the court: the inner court, the outer court and a composition of forces of the court as a whole. In the next, we will deal with dynamic ‘operations’ of the court: an information-control mechanism, the deployment of defensive forces, and conditions that led to crises and historical decline.
