Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The Forbidden City was built in just fourteen years through the efforts of a million workers and is the largest unified complex of wooden buildings in the world. The wood is rare and precious, and every yellow (the imperial color) ceramic roof tile glorifies the emperor. The Forbidden City was the seat of government for six hundred years, for twenty-four emperors in the Ming and Qing dynasties. When our astutely political chaperone showed us through in 1982, he attempted to condescend to the values it embodied, but he couldn’t entirely eliminate the wonder in his voice as he described the life that had once unfolded there. In the outer court, we felt the aloofness of the imperial rulers of China; nothing about these buildings was designed to offer comfort. In the inner court, even the emperor’s apartments proved to be forbidding manifestations of imperial station. The whole setup reflected the inherited wealth and exploitative prerogatives of aristocracy that the country had officially rejected. Our minder was more comfortable with the militarism of the Great Wall than with these palatial quarters, but he recognized that the buildings’ conceptual grace and superb proportions represented the apogee of something brilliantly Chinese—that they constituted part of his cultural heritage.

At that time, we neither saw nor heard of the Qianlong Emperor’s retirement gardens, the landscape at the far end of which the Juanqinzhai stands. The site was too intimate for the burgeoning crowds of tourists, and no one in China then had the skills requisite for its conservation, but the decades of its neglect also suggest an element of purposeful disregard. Although the Communists accused the Qing dynasty of exploitation, those emperors had represented total authority, a legacy that Mao and his successors gamely sustained. The pavilions of the retirement garden signify lavish materialism and rarefied intellect and were thus utterly anathema to Maoism. The larger Forbidden City remained at the heart of Chinese command, and the sizable portrait of Mao that still hangs over its entrance gate was a potent sign of his enduring authority. In contrast, the retirement garden was a luxurious place of repose for an emperor to pamper himself with solitude after giving up power—and the latter-day rulers of China were not interested in a life after power. Nor were champions of collective action interested in the meditative sequestration of an individual.

I returned on numerous occasions to the Forbidden City, but I didn’t learn of the existence of the retirement garden until 1999. The buildings there, including the nine-bay Juanqinzhai, had been ignored so utterly as to have suffered little looting or destruction. The Qianlong Emperor had delivered a sort of early preservation edict, commanding that the garden be maintained in perpetuity as a retreat for retired emperors, but since no other emperors retired, it became the beneficiary of benign neglect for the remaining decades of the Qing dynasty. Over six hundred years, the princes’ residences and concubines’ quarters were rebuilt numerous times—but not the Juanqinzhai. This is the only spot that has the complete vision of one emperor. A dowager empress lived there for a little while, and some members of the court had birthday parties there. Pu Yi, the last emperor, added a painting to the complex. Otherwise, it stood empty, then was locked up in 1924 and used only as storage space by Palace Museum staff focused on the public areas of the Forbidden City. When it was unlocked in 1999, as the Palace Museum began to prepare itself for the Olympic bid, it was a time capsule—one of the few survivors of the attack on history that was China’s twentieth century. It was weathered, faded, and a bit decayed, but it retained its integrity, and conserving it would require little of the guesswork that has plagued interventions at other historic Chinese buildings.