The Forbidden City Quiz | World Sites

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. The Forbidden City is known in Chinese as "Zi jin cheng" which is a reference to a color. What is the color?

Answer: Purple

"Zi jin cheng" means Purple Forbidden City. The ancient Chinese believed that the Purple Star (North Star) was in the center of the heaven. The Heavenly King lived in the Purple Palace. The Chinese Emperor was always referred as the "Son of the Heavenly King".

The Forbidden City is also known as "Gu Gong Bo Wu Yuan" in Chinese.

2. The Forbidden City is twice the size of Vatican City and three times the size of the Kremlin. Roughly how big is it in square meters?

Answer: 720,000

The Forbidden City (753 meters from east to west, 981 meters from north to south) covers an area of about 720,000 square meters (178 acres). It consists of 90 palaces and courtyards, 980 buildings, and over 8700 rooms.

3. The Forbidden City is constructed symmetrically along a central north-south axis, which is also the axis of the old Beijing City. There are four gates in each direction. Which gate is the main entrance?

Answer: South

The Meridian Gate (Wumen) is about 38 meters high, and is the most imposing gate to the Forbidden City. It has a concave layout with five towers appearing like a flying phoenix.

The gate has five gateways, of which the central gateway was reserved for the Emperor, for the Empress on the occasion of her wedding, and the top candidate who passed the Imperial examination.

4. Many of the major imperial gates are painted red, with the door-nails in rows of nine. What does nine symbolize?

Answer: Supreme power of the Emperor

The number nine and the dragon with five claws on the Emperor's robe symbolize the supreme power of the Emperor. In Chinese this means "jiu wu zhi zun".

5. Yellow and red are the two most common colors in the Palace. Red symbolizes auspicious events, happiness and celebrations. Yellow symbolizes one of the five elements. Which one?

Answer: Earth

Yellow symbolizes the earth elements at the center, and the imperial palace is at the world's center and the emperor's reign radiates out from it. Hence, yellow is associated with the emperor's imperial dictum.

6. As many as 10,000 special logs were widely used for the construction of the palace. This very rare wood from southwest region is known for its density and beauty. What is the name of this wood? (Hint: named after the location)

Answer: Nanmu

Nanmu, also known as Phoebe zhennan, is a large species of tree which can grow up to 30 meters high. Zhennan means Nan in Chinese. This tree can only be found in Guizhou, Hubei and Sichuan. It is very expensive and only the royal families could afford to use it as a building material. During the construction, the logs were transported in barges along the Grand Canal, 18,000 km southwest of Beijing.

7. Located behind the Hall of Preserved Harmony in the center of the stairway, there is a huge marble sculpture of nine dragons playing with pearls. It is the largest single stone sculpture, weighing about 250 tons. How was the stone transported from the quarry 70 km away from the Palace?

Answer: Dragged along the icy road during winter

A well was dug on the ground every 500 meters and filled with water to form an icy road to facilitate the transportation. It took a month with about 20,000 men and thousands of mules and horses to do the job.

8. There are three main buildings in the Outer Court along the north-south axis. The most important of these in the Outer Court is known as the Hall of what?

Answer: Supreme Harmony

The Hall of Supreme Harmony is the largest, and rises some 30 meters in height. It is the ceremonial centre of imperial power, and the largest surviving wooden structure in China. It is nine bays wide and five bays deep, the numbers nine and five being symbolically connected to the majesty of the Emperor. Seventy-two Nanmu logs in row of six are used as the support pillars for the roof.

This Hall was destroyed a few times by fires mainly caused by lightning strikes. The first incident occurred only a hundred days after the opening ceremony in 1420.

9. There are also three main buildings in the Inner Court along the north-south axis, the one which the Emperor used to occupy is known as the Hall of what?

Answer: Heavenly Purity

The Palace of Heavenly Purity represents Yang. The Palace of Earthly Tranquility which the Empress used to occupy represents Yin. In between them was the Hall of Union, where the Yin and Yang mixed to produce harmony.

10. During the six-hundred years of history of the Forbidden City, the Palace has survived many earthquakes including the severe Tangshan earthquake in 1976. This measured 7.8 on the Richter scale and left 700,000 casualties. Survival of the complex was credited to good "Dou-gong" and "Sun-mao". "Dou-gong" and "Sun-mao" are best described as what?

Answer: Carpentry techniques

The survival of the structure was credited to carpentry techniques of "dou gong" and "sun mao". These techniques which do not use nails and glues were developed more than 2600 years ago and fully developed during the Ming Dynasty. Many wooden structures in Japan are using the same technology.

"Dou gong" is a unique structural element of interlocking wooden brackets. Interlocking bracket sets are formed by placing a large wooden block (dou) to provide a solid base for the bow-shaped brackets (gong). The gong supports the beam or another gong above it.

Adding multiple dougong greatly reduced the strain on the horizontal beams and allows structures to be flexible with the ability to withstand damage from earthquakes.

"Sun mao" is the Chinese term referring to the "tenon" joint; the projection on a piece of wood that connects one wooden block to another in carpentry.

Source: Author wilfredwee

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor stedman before going online.
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The Forbidden City Trivia Quiz

2020 marks the 600th anniversary of the palace complex called the Forbidden City. This is the world's largest wooden palace complex and was nominated by UNESCO as a World Cultural Heritage Site in 1987.

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