Forbidden City Completed in Beijing

1420

After fourteen years of labor by a million conscripts, the Yongle Emperor's new northern palace opened its vermilion gates. Nine thousand rooms, roofs of imperial yellow tile, courtyards calibrated to cosmological axis. The Ming court moved from Nanjing and China's center of gravity shifted permanently toward the steppe. Its north-south axis, aligned with the Pole Star, expressed the emperor's cosmological role as mediator between heaven and earth.