Construction Contrivance
Located at the center of Beijing, the Forbidden City, Gu Gong in Chinese, now known as the imperial palace museum, is the world's largest palace complex. Construction of the 183 acre hectare covering palace complex began in 1407. It was completed fourteen years later through long-term hard labor by a million workers and artisans. Stone needed was quarried from Fangshan. A well was dug every fifty meters along the road to Beijing in order to pour water onto the road in winter to slide huge stones on ice into the city. The palace complex is a show case for ancient Chinese building ingenuity. The angular shape of the grand red city wall prevents climbing it, being 8.6 meters wide at the base and reducing to 6.66 meters at the top. The bricks themselves were made from white lime and glutenous rice, the cement from glutenous rice and egg whites, making making the wall extraordinarily strong.