THE GUIDE - The Rough Guide to Beijing - page 77

Baohedian
The third of the great ceremonial halls, the Baohedian , or Preserving Harmony Hall, was the
venue for state banquets and imperial examinations; graduates from the latter were appoin-
ted to positions of power in what was the world's first recognizably bureaucratic civil ser-
vice. Huge ceremonies took place here to celebrate Chinese New Year; in 1903, this involved
the sacrifice of 10,000 sheep. The hall's galleries, originally treasure houses, display various
finds from the site, though the most spectacular, a vast marble block carved with dragons and
clouds, stands at the rear of the hall. A Ming creation, reworked in the eighteenth century,
it's among the finest carvings in the palace and certainly the largest - the 250-tonne chunk of
marble was slid here from well outside the city by flooding the roads in winter to form sheets
of ice.
The imperial living quarters
To the north of the ceremonial halls, and repeating their hierarchy, are the three principal
palaces of the imperiallivingquarters : the Qianqinggong, the Jiaotaidian and the Kunning-
gong. Emperors also made use of a clutch of surrounding halls.
DINING, IMPERIAL STYLE
The emperor ate twice a day, at 6.30am and around noon. Often meals consisted of hun-
dreds of dishes, with the emperor eating no more than a mouthful of each - to eat more
would be to express a preference, and that information might reach a potential poisoner.
According to tradition, no one else was allowed to eat at his table, and when banquets were
held he sat at a platform well above his guests. Such occasions were extremely formal
and not to everyone's liking; a Jesuit priest invited to such a feast in 1727 complained, “A
European dies of hunger here; the way in which he is forced to sit on the ground on a mat
with crossed legs is most awkward; neither the wine nor the dishes are to his taste… Every
time the emperor says a word which lets it be known he wishes to please, one must kneel
down and hit one's head on the ground. This has to be done every time someone serves him
something to drink.”
Qianqinggong
Its terrace surmounted by incense burners in the form of cranes and tortoises (see Imperial
symbolism ) the extravagant Qianqinggong , or Palace of Heavenly Purity, was originally the
imperial bedroom. It was here in 1785 that Qianlong presided over the famous “banquet of
old men” that brought together three thousand men of over sixty years of age from all corners
of the empire. Used for the lying-in-state of the emperor, the hall also played a role in the
tradition that finally solved the problem of succession (hitherto fraught with intrigue and un-
certainty, as the principle of primogeniture was not used), a practice begun by Qing Emperor
Yongzheng. Keeping an identical document on his person, Yongzheng and his successors de-