The Forbidden City is not actually a city at all, but the Imperial Palace complex in Beijing from which the Chinese emperors ruled their empire for centuries. It was called the Forbidden City because it was forbidden for commoners or even uninvited nobility to enter its sacred precincts.

The largest royal complex in the world, it was constructed over a fourteen year period, from 1407 to 1420, during the Ming Dynasty. It was the home and center of government for 24 emperors of China through the end of the Ming Dynasty and the entirety of the Qing (Ch'ing) Dynasty, until the overthrow of Imperial Rule in the early part of the Twentieth Century.

The Forbidden City is surrounded by a wall about 30 feet (10 meters) high, and a moat almost 20 feet (6 meters) deep. The walls encompass an area almost 8 million square feet, or 168 acres--about the size of 140 football fields. The complex houses 9,999 rooms; nine is considered a particularly propitious number in Chinese numerology.

The walls of the buildings are red, their roofs yellow. Yellow was the Imperial color and was forbidden to those who were not members of the Imperial family. Everything in the Emperor's personal rooms was yellow, including his clothing and bedding.

The Forbidden City was home to an enormous number of people, as many as nine thousand in the high point of the Qing Dynasty, including the royal family, concubines, servants, guards, and civil servants, many of whom entered service in the Forbidden City never to leave again during their lifetimes.

The last royal inhabitant of the Forbidden City was P'u Yi, who was chosen to succeed his grandmother, the Dowager Empress. She elevated him over both her sons, the eldest of whom she deposed. P'u Yi's father was the deposed emperor's younger brother.

The last emperor ascended to the "Dragon Throne" at the age of three in 1909, but was dethroned by a rebellion at the age of five. He and the royal family continued to live in the Forbidden city until forced to flee by social upheavals in 1924. He was briefly installed as emperor of a portion of China annexed by Japan, but was a puppet ruler for Japan. Held for a time by the Soviets after World War II, he was forced to return to China where he spent 10 years in a 'reeducation camp'. Released in 1959, he was given a job as a gardener and made public appearances at the insistence of the Communist government. He died in 1967. Director Bernardo Bertolucci made a movie about his life in 1987; it was filmed on location in the Forbidden City.

Portions of the enclosing walls were demolished in the fifties to make the open area now called Tian'anmen Square; it is named after the Tian'amen Gate into the palace complex, the Gate of Heavenly Peace. The Forbidden City is now a museum to China's imperialist past.