As Beijing's great palace is painstakingly restored to its former glory for the Olympics, the story of the city's bloody beginnings can at last be told.
This is the incredible story of the creation of the largest palace on Earth. The Forbidden City - boasting 9,000 rooms and built from huge timbers shipped hundreds of miles - took a labour force of a million men and was built to proclaim the power of just one man, the great Ming Emperor Yongle (played in the programme's reconstructions by Anthony Brandon Wong, pictured).
The Forbidden City stood at the heart of imperial China for over five centuries but had a dark beginning. Now, the long neglected chronicles of the Ming Dynasty, many translated into English for the first time especially for this film, tell how the despotic emperor Yongle battled his way to the top, betrayed his own family and killed all in his path to steal the throne.
And once he was there, he set about constructing a gilded palace the like of which the world had never seen, stocked with beautiful concubines and policed by eunuchs, a living symbol of his ultimate power. But within days of its opening it had burned to the ground... some would say as the vengeance of heaven.
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