After watching the auction, I suddenly felt the urge to visit the Forbidden City. I drove to the Forbidden City to buy tickets and found a senior tour guide, Zhou Hui, two hundred per hour.

"I wonder if you have any attractions you are most interested in?" Zhou Hui tentatively said: "After all, the Forbidden City is very big, and it is more affordable to visit with a focus."

Johnson nodded, with a considerate suggestion, and said casually: "I am interested in furniture and diet."

After hearing this, Zhou Hui smiled and said, "No problem, then today we will focus on furniture and palace food. I hope you can return home with a full load."

Everyone started to visit, entered from the Meridian Gate, passed the Jinshui Bridge and came to the square in front of the Taihe Hall, which was the area where the outer court was located. The Hall of Taihe on the nine-meter high platform, the Hall of Taihe Hall and the Baohe Hall, the most important building in the Forbidden City, the place where the emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties handled government affairs and held court meetings.

"The Palace of Supreme Harmony was called Fengtian Hall in the early Ming Dynasty, Jiajing was changed to Huangji Hall, and it was changed to Taihe Hall in the early Qing Dynasty. It was the most important hall in the Forbidden City, and the building with the highest specifications and system levels among ancient wooden structures..."

"The interior and exterior decoration is extremely luxurious. The outer beam is made of golden dragons and seals. Above the throne is a golden lacquer panlong caisson. The six powdered panlong golden pillars near the throne reach the top of the hall, connected up and down, left and right, and the golden light is brilliant..."

Knowing that the customer likes furniture, Zhou Hui's explanation was very clear. When he entered the hall, he pointed to the bricks on the ground and said, "One tael of gold was 1,500 kilograms of fine rice in the early Ming Dynasty. The salary of the three county magistrates in the early Qing Dynasty was only the cost of a piece of floor tiles in the Forbidden City."

"The soil in Jiangnan is sticky but not dispersed, and powder but not sandy. After seven processes of digging, transportation, drying, pushing, pounding, grinding and sieving, it is left in the open for a whole year to remove the soil."

"The water soaked in Gusu, and was clarified, precipitated, filtered, dried, pedaled, and beaten six steps, and refined into dense mud..."

"Make a mold with wooden boards, put the mud in, and the craftsman step on barefoot until it is firm. Remove the excess mud and grind it smoothly with a wooden stick, and the other side of the brick should also be smoothed."

"Put it in a cool place, dry the shade for eight months, and then burn it for one month to remove the moisture; burn it for one month, burn it for one month, burn it for one month, burn it for forty days..."

"The craftsmen climbed up to the top of the kiln, watered the hot kiln and cooled it down for four or five days, until the day of leaving the kiln. During the long process, if you are not careful, all the efforts of the entire kiln bricks will be wasted."

"It is only a semi-finished product after being cut and grinded and soaked in tung oil. Each person can only cut three pieces a day. The bricks of the previous era, specifications, origins, the mansions of the Supervisor, and the name of the craftsman are burned from the canal to the north and directly to Tongzhou."

"Finally, after strict inspections by the government, each brick must have more than three alternatives, and all those that are not selected will be destroyed!"

After hearing this, Johnson felt like he was stepping on gold. Zhou Hui smiled and said, "Of course, this kind of style is only qualified to be furnished by the palaces that the emperor often visits, and it is not visible to most parts of the Forbidden City."

"After a complex and long work, the nameless craftsman made the originally unknown soil worth gold. He built a magnificent palace in four years; or he could only polish a brick for two years."

"This is the real low-key luxury!"

When you walk to the center of the hall, you will see the most important chair in five hundred years. Whoever can sit on it can hold the world.

There is no second chair in the carved dragon and gold-painted chair, the imperial throne of the Nine Five, the only master in the world, the Hall of Supreme Harmony with 2377 square meters, and even the square of more than 30,000 square meters.

All the focus is on the throne, held high by seven steps, surrounded by incense tubes, incense burners, and auspicious beasts. The crane blesses the emperor's health and longevity. The treasure elephant symbolizes the stability and stability of the country.

Elephants come with treasure vases, bringing good harvests and good fortune, meaning: peace has elephants.

The sacred world brings extensive knowledge, showing that the emperor is on the throne and knows the world.

Screen was specially set behind the throne when the Zhou Dynasty was born to show that the emperor was the authority of the emperor.

Because he could not visit up close, Zhou Hui took out the photos on his phone and showed the details: "Although the throne is exquisite, it is actually not comfortable to sit because it has no backrest, and there is no armrest. The thirteen dragons are carved, as if they always remind the emperor that there is not a chair under his butt, but the world."

Then we went to the next door, in the center of the Hall of Supreme Harmony, six dragon golden pillars surrounded a sacred space with shining golden light. The golden pillar was 12.7 meters high and 1.06 meters in diameter, so that only three or four people could pick it up.

"For such a thick column, at least two layers of hemp should be added outside the wood, applied to the dust six times, and then decorate the pattern with a powder and gold paste. There is only one gold foil factory in Jinling in the country, and this process still retains it."

"The purity of 99.99 gold is made into small pieces of gold leaves after multiple processes, and sandwiched into black gold paper fumigated with kerosene, and then beat it for 20,000 times. It takes six to eight hours to beat 1 gram of gold into about 0.5 square meters of gold foil, with a thickness of only 1.5 mm per ten thousand."

"Plush the pillars with gold foil, and six coiled dragons will fly over the cliff patterns of the water river. The dragon heads of the three golden pillars in the east look up to the west and the east look up to the east, echoing the golden dragon in the caisson. The coiled dragon caisson, screen, and throne form the space of the dragon, highlighting the dignity of the true dragon emperor."

He is worthy of being a senior tour guide. He is very tall and powerful in the moment after listening to it. Invisible pretense is the most fatal.

"Not only the bricks on the ground are precious, but even the tiles above our heads are treasures!" Zhou Hui smiled and said, "You should have heard of Liulichang? There was a place where the glazed tiles from the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties were burned. Qianlong probably thought it was too close to the palace and was polluted and smog. Later, he ordered to move to Mentougou, the western suburbs. Now the place is still called Liuliqu."

"The tiles are glazed and then put into the kiln again, and the color is bright and like glazed. Different colors are because the glaze contains different metal oxides. The red iron oxide glaze will be burned into yellow glazed tiles."

"The glaze of copper oxide is fired into emerald green, and the cobalt oxide is fired into blue, and the principle is the same as that of enamel."

"In any Forbidden City where there must be rules, the color also pays attention to the five elements, each representing a direction. Yellow belongs to earth, and earth is in the middle. The emperor lives in the world, and most of the roofs of the Forbidden City are yellow."

"The three places in the south are located in the east, belong to wood, and are mainly green and are mainly born. The place where young princes and grandchildren learn and grow, the roof is green tiles. The north belongs to water, and are mainly black. The east and west large rooms in Shenwu Gate are made of black roofs."

"All specifications are interlocking each other, layered up, extending all the way to the tiles at the end of the eaves. A round hole is left on the back, nailed into the tiles to prevent them from sliding down. The glazed tiles on the entire roof are connected to form an airtight protective umbrella to block the wind and rain of the palace."

When he went out, he walked back along the central axis. Zhou Hui said that all the stones in the Forbidden City came from Dashiwo in Fangshan, the southwest suburb. It was 90 kilometers away. The transportation road was long and difficult.

In ancient times, many people dug wells, which were very densely dug, one mile or one well. The behavior that made the people along the way was quite puzzled was actually the key to solving the transportation problem.

When winter comes, the vanguard transported forces draw water from the well and sprinkle it on the road to freeze the road. Workers and mules and horses can drag the stones and slide on the ice.

The largest part, even if you use this method, you still have to use more than 20,000 migrant workers and two thousand mules and horses. You can only move slowly for three kilometers every day and take it to the construction site after 28 days of hard journey.

It was placed at the northern end of the three halls of the previous dynasty. After careful carving by skilled craftsmen, the largest stone sculpture in the Forbidden City finally surfaced.

The surging waves are rippling with fairy grass, flowing clouds, and nine dragons tumbling among them, which means that the emperor lives in the high heavenly palace. The stone carving weighs 200 tons and is placed behind Baohe Hall with a cloud dragon stairs stone.

Zhou Hui said as she walked: "Most of these huge rocks were placed on the central axis of the Forbidden City. A hundred years ago, no one dared to walk on this road under our feet, because only the emperor could pass through it, and it was called the Imperial Road."
Chapter completed!