Forbidden, now Palace of the people

Wang Ge got lost on his first day working in Beijing's Forbidden City, a 500-year-old palace of some 9,000 rooms, huge walls and labyrinthine passageways. The Forbidden City, also known as Palace Museum, is in the heart of the capital and covers 720,000 square meters. It was home to 24 emperors of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. "I couldn't see anything modern, just old walls and the roofs of halls. I had never felt so close to history," Wang says of his first day working at the Palace Museum's exhibition department, 11 years ago. Like many other museum employees, Wang rides a bicycle to work every day, but he didn't know that 100 years earlier China's last emperor, Pu Yi, too, cycled around the Forbidden City. He even ordered the thresholds of some palace gates removed so he could ride without hindrance. Pu Yi ascended the throne in 1908 and was forced to abdicate after the 1911 Revolution. According to the articles of favorable treatment determined by the interim government of the Republic of China and the Qing court, Pu Yi was allowed to continue living in the palace. Following a coup launched by warlord Feng Yuxiang in 1924, however, Pu Yi was forced to leave the Forbidden City. Later, scholars, government officials and former Qing officials formed the Committee for the Readjustment of the Affairs of the Qing House, to establish the Palace Museum. At the opening ceremony of the Palace Museum on Oct 10, 1925, the committee announced: "From now on, this place belongs to all the people of China." "Turning from the Forbidden City to the Palace Museum was a symbol of epochal change," says Li Gongming, an art history professor at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. "Its connotation of political power was replaced by civil rights and cultural exchanges," Li says. As an ordinary citizen, Pu Yi revisited the former palace in 1959. In his autobiography, From Emperor to Citizen, Pu Yi wrote: "What I found most surprising was that the air of decay and collapse I had known there when I left had disappeared. "In the imperial garden I saw children playing in the sun and old men sipping tea. I sniffed the spring fragrance of the ancient cypresses and felt that the sun was shining brighter here than it had ever done before. I was sure that the former palace had taken a new lease on life." The family of Liang Jinsheng, former head of the cultural relics administration department at Palace Museum, experienced the transformation of the Forbidden City to the Palace Museum.