Customer Reviews:
 A little secretive pleasure September 12, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
If you want a big, glossy picture book of the Forbidden City don't buy this book. If you want something lovely that you'll keep forever, buy it indeed! This is the "Little Black Book" on the subject of the palace itself and so much more. It's a small, neat, lovely to handle edition whose only colour is in the red endpapers that are exactly the red of the Forbidden City's palace walls. The old, grainy, black and white photographs add to the pleasure and increase the feeling that you are getting something true and genuine instead of just another travel guide. Geremie Barme's text is erudite, as you'd expect from a Professor of Asian History, but it's also deliciously gossipy and has a pace and feeling for detail that is never boring. Professor Barme is especially good on the modern uses the Forbidden City has been put to, and his views on the Communist era are refreshingly balanced, putting Chairman Mao into the "Imperial" context very nicely. I especially loved it because it had a picture of an event I actually attended: the 1976 funeral of Chou En Lai. The shock of seeing it, just as it was, came as a delightful surprise. A lovely book. It feels Chinese.
 A meandering book August 22, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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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