Outer court in front, inner court behind
The Forbidden City stands in the centre of Beijing, in Dongcheng, the district on the eastern side of the old centre. Its plan is the one Chinese palace builders kept returning to: a central axis, a symmetrical layout, the outer court in front and the inner court behind, with further garden courts carried over from the Yuan city. The listing text calls it the supreme model of that development. Walk it and the idea is physical. Gates and halls step back along one line. The public business of the court comes first. The rooms of the household come after. Gardens open to the side rather than breaking the line.
Built for Zhu Di, kept by two dynasties
The Ming emperor Zhu Di had the palace constructed between 1406 and 1420. Over the next 505 years, 14 Ming emperors and 10 Qing emperors were enthroned here. A shorter description on the same page speaks of a seat of power across 1416–1911, and of nearly 10,000 rooms holding furniture and works of art. Those are the page’s own phrasings of one palace, not two different palaces. The World Heritage property is serial. Beijing was inscribed in 1987 and the Qing palace in Shenyang in 2004, under criteria (i), (ii), (iii) and (iv). The Beijing property is given as 84.96 hectares, with a buffer of 153.1 hectares. Shenyang is another city. It does not belong to this courtyard.
A museum from 1925
After the Qing dynasty fell, the state declared the two palace complexes museums, Beijing in 1925 and Shenyang in 1926. In 1961 both were in the first group of State Priority Protected Sites named by the State Council. What a reader meets now is still the wooden hierarchy of an imperial house: axis, symmetry, outer court, inner court. The municipal culture bureau’s scenic list, dated 30 July 2026, places the Palace Museum in Dongcheng. That list ranks sites. It does not change the plan of the courtyards.