The Forbidden City - Hardcover

The bewildering vastness and past imperialism of the Forbidden City come alive in Barme's account. (Glasgow Herald)

What a gorgeous dream of a book Barme had produced...will resonate powerfully with any history lover. (Sunday Express)

...genial, neatly written...Barme narrates the intrigues, the eunuchs and the concubines. (Independent)

A vivid and compelling portrait of this extraordinary attraction. (Sunday Telegraph)

This Rolls-Royce of a guidebook covers almost every conceivable physical and historical nook...packs a veritable palace of information into its pages... brims with scholarship. (Sunday Times)

...in a class of its own. (TLS)

It was built by a Ming Emperor in our fifteenth century - to be a terrestrial reflection of the celestial realm of the Jade Emperor. Destroyed and rebuilt on an even more splendid scale by the final ManchuQuing Emperors, it consists of a series of courtyards approached by gates (chief among them Tianan Men) and an imperial way. This book brilliantly reconstructs the life that went on in those ancestral temples, lacquered chambers and vermilion halls both in the imperial heyday and in the decadent decline under the Dowager Empress. Fifty years ago Mao considered razing all to the ground. Now it is a Wonder of the World.