The Forbidden City
The Age
Saturday March 22, 2008
The Forbidden City
Geremie R. Barme Profile Books, $39.95WHEN NIXON BECAME the first American president to visit communist China and thereby recognise it (after Gough!), he was shown through the recently refurbished imperial centre of China - the Forbidden City, in Beijing. Nixon was bored, but Kissinger saw its labyrinthine ways as emblematic of China and the Chinese mind "meaning residing in a totality that only long reflection could grasp". Geremie Barme's study of the city, which was built between 1406 and 1420, is also a history of China, through the Ming and Manchu Qing dynasties, to Republican and communist China, in which the enduring symbol of the country is the Forbidden City itself. It framed the way westerners saw the "inscrutable" Chinese, and stood for the unchanging nature of power through centuries of radical change. Dynasties, royal and state, may come and go, but - to quote Kafka (and Barme does) - "the empire is immortal". Part of a series "Wonders of the World", it is clearly written, highly informed, and amounts to something of demystification of the Forbidden City.
© 2008 The Age
Share This