An early Ming blue-and-white porcelain bowl
Bowl with pomegranates, lotus scrolls, and chrysanthemum petals, early 15th century
Marked Beijing

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Ming Beijing and the Forbidden City

The Ming emperors rebuilt the Great Wall in brick and moved the capital to Beijing, where from 1406 to 1420 they built the Forbidden City, a palace of nearly a thousand buildings that few were allowed to enter.

Place
Beijing · Nanjing · Jingdezhen · BadalingAsia
Laid out as
A cityOne city, district by district, from its centre outwards.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IThe first Ming emperor
  2. IIMoving to Beijing
  3. IIIThe Forbidden City
  4. IVThe Great Wall in brick
  5. VPorcelain for the world
  6. VIThe fall of the Ming

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Hongwu Emperor
  • Yongle Emperor
  • Wanli Emperor

Objects

  • Blue-and-white porcelain
  • The Ming tombs

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1368 to 1644. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?