The incomprehensible fact about this palace, to us uninitiated barbarians, is that there are three of these rooms exactly alike, with the same throne, the same carpet, the same ornaments, in the same places; they are preceded by the same great marble courts and are constructed on the same marble terraces; you reach them by the same staircases and by the same imperial paths.
Why should there be three of them? For, of necessity, the first conceals the two others, and in order to pass from the first to the second, or from the second to the third, you must go down each time into a vast gloomy court without any view and then come up again between the piles of ivory-colored marble, so superb, yet so monotonous and oppressive!
There must be some mysterious reason connected with the use of the number three. This repetition produced on our disordered imaginations an effect analogous to that of the three similar sanctuaries and the three similar courts in the great Temple of the Lamas.
Copyright, 1901, by J. C. Hemment
Priceless Porcelains and Bronzes in the Third Palace, Forbidden City
I had already seen the private apartments of the young Emperor. Those of the Empress—for she had apartments here too, in addition to the frail palaces her fancy had scattered over the parks of the Yellow City—those of the Empress are less gloomy and much less dark. Room after room exactly alike, with large windows and superb yellow enamelled roofs. Each one has its marble steps, guarded by two lions all shining with gold, and the little gardens which separate them are filled with bronze ornaments, heraldic beasts, phœnixes, or crouching monsters.
Inside are yellow silks and square arm-chairs of the form consecrated by time, unchanging as China itself. On the chests, on the tables, a quantity of precious articles are placed in small glass cases,—because of the perpetual dust of Pekin,—and this makes them as cheerless as mummies and casts over the apartment the chill of a museum. There are many artificial bouquets of chimerical flowers of neutral shades in amber, jade, agate, and moonstones.
The great and inimitable luxury of these palace rooms consists of the series of ebony arches so carved as to seem a bower of dark leaves. In what far-away forest did the trees grow that permitted such groves to be created out of one single piece? And by means of what implements and what patience are they able to carve each stem and each leaf of light bamboo, or each fine needle of the cedar, out of the very heart of the tree, and to add to them birds and butterflies of the most exquisite workmanship?