The Forbidden City (Wonders of the World) | 
 enlarge | Author: Geremie R. Barme
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 195885
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.2 x 4.5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0674027795
Dewey Decimal Number: 951.156
EAN: 9780674027794
ASIN: 0674027795
Publication Date: May 31, 2008
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Condition: brand new condition!
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Product Description
Read supplementary material prepared by Geremie Barme Read the Bldg Blog interview with Mary Beard about the Wonders of the World series (Part I and Part II) The Forbidden City (Zijin Cheng) lying at the heart of Beijing formed the hub of the Celestial Empire for five centuries. Over the past century it has led a reduced life as the refuge for a deposed emperor, as well as a heritage museum for monarchist, republican, and socialist citizens, and it has been celebrated and excoriated as a symbol of all that was magnificent and terrible in dynastic China’s legacy. The Forbidden City’s vermilion walls have fueled literary fantasies that have become an intrinsic part of its disputed and documented history. Mao Zedong even considered razing the entire structure to make way for the buildings of a new socialist China. The fictions surrounding the Forbidden City have also had an international reach, and writers like Franz Kafka, Elias Canetti, Jorge Luis Borges, and Mervyn Peake have all succumbed to its myths. The politics it enshrined have provided the vocabulary of power that is used in China to the present day, though it is now better known as a film set or the background of displays of opera, rock, and fashion. Geremie Barme peels away the veneer of power, secrecy, inscrutability, and passions of imperial China, to provide a new and original history of the culture, politics, and architecture of the Forbidden City. Designed to overawe the visitor with the power of imperial China, the Forbidden City remains one of the true wonders of the world. (20080203)
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| Customer Reviews:
 A meandering book August 22, 2008
I read this book cover to cover because I am a big Beijing fan and I visit frequently. I am sorry to say that I did not find very many new facts in it - a good guidebook (for example the Blue Guide) will provide the same facts in a much more compact format.
Barme, who is a very talented academic, is at his best when he covers the debate in the Communist party about what to do with the Forbidden City and with Old Beijing; this part of the story of the Forbidden City is frequently ignored, but indeed reveals a lot about how the Chinese leadership thought in the revolutionary period.
This is a very elegant book - hardbound in cloth, printed on heavy, nicely textured paper. The pictures, unfortunately, are not up to the same standard: anything but sharp, and in black and white only; they often look like they have been reproduced from old newspapers.
There are a few interesting, even memorable, pages in this book - several pages trace one day in the life of a Qing emperor from dusk to night; I have already mentioned the discussion of the debates within the Communist leadership.
Barme is less successful when he tries to convey the mistique of the Forbidden City as it was invented by Western writers - at some point he gets completely sidetracked with a very long quotation from an unpublished memoire by a never-heard-of French writer who describes a (fictitious) sexual encounter with the Cixi Empress Dowager in much graphical detail. Exactly what how this shaped Western perceptions, since it was never published, is not clear.
The worst defect, however, is the lack of structure. The book meanders through ages, starting in Revolutionary China, backtracking the Ming, progressing on until the Republic of China, and again to the revolution (but not as linearly). It also meanders through the buildings themselves. To put it otherwise, it is not usable as a guidebook on site (there is no systematic walkthrough of the buildings, and there is very little about what the visitor will see, the description being limited to the name of the buildings and their usage through history), and it is not a coherent chronological history either.
 Encylopedic & entertaining history and gossip of the Fobidden City and its meaning May 27, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This great book gives an amazing "counter-revolutionary" history of the great Forbidden City of the Chinese Emperors. You'll read how the city is seen in all sorts of manifestations, including in movies, how it was ignored in the hey day of communist china by both the government and also politically correct visitors in the 70s, how from gradual openings in the late 70s to how you can barely find a quite spot. Another point: its a very large city, both in size, grandeur, history and importance. Lots of great photographs populate the American edition.
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