Secrets of the Forbidden City
Director: Mark
Lewis
Year: 2008
Rating: 6.5
I am not a fan
of history documentaries that make use of recreating scenes and figures with
actors. Maybe it was my schooling, but it feels unnecessary. I am not here
to be entertained but to be educated. Give me a good lecture using photos
and artifacts and I am fine. I have loads of those Great Courses videos.
But these folks do a solid job and it seems that BBC was willing to give
the filmmakers a good budget as they not only recreate scenes but structures,
costumes and loads of extras. I don't know if that taught me anything, but
the women were very pretty.
It also helps that the story is fascinating.
The building of the Forbidden City some 600 years ago and still standing.
Thank goodness for megalomaniacs for tourism. Without them in history there
would be no pyramids, no Angkor Wat, no Forbidden Palace and of course the
White House Ballroom. This was Emperor Yongle aka Zhu Di, third Emperor of
the Ming Dynasty. He was a crazy fucker, extraordinarily ambitious and cruel
- but in terms of Chinese Emperors considered a good one. When his father
the Emperor died in 1398, the title was passed to his young nephew. Not pleased,
he began a coup and a civil war that allowed him to take the throne in 1402.
At this tim,e the palace was in Nanjing
and to signal a new beginning, Yongle decided to move the capital to Beijing
and of course build a palace. Some palace. On a huge tract of land with multiple
buildings, it took 14 years to build, over 100,000 workers and materials
from all over China. He had to build a canal from Nanjing to Beijing to transport
material. Pretty amazing. The documentary also delves into the lives of the
hundreds of concubines, thousands of eunuchs and the many executions. 90-minutes.