故宫600年，弹指一挥间丨Tribute to a 600-year-old history book

The year 2020 marks the 600th anniversary of the Palace Museum, which has served as a royal palace for the Ming and Qing dynasties. Since Wednesday, a group of photos that compare the Palace Museum's past with its current went viral online, and had been read 140 million times by Thursday noon.

It was in 1406 that Zhu Di, the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty, ordered the construction of a royal palace in Beijing, his new capital. Fourteen years later, the palace was ready and started rendering service to two dynasties that succeed one another. After the last emperor of China, Pu Yi of the Qing Dynasty, abdicated in 1912 and moved out of the palace in 1925, the premises in the Forbidden City was opened to the public and came to be called the Palace Museum.

After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Palace Museum underwent further repairs, but the major parts of the Palace Museum remained what they were. 

Each brick of the museum, spread across 720,000 square meters, thus echoes the history of 600 years. Even a blinking red tile on the roof has been witnessing to major events that decided China's fate 200 years ago, while the scars on the stone wall might have been there for even longer.

The Palace Museum is like a history book, replete with both sweet and bitter pages. Every invasion left its indelible mark on it. In 1860, Beijing was occupied by the Anglo-French expeditionary army; In 1900, it was again occupied by the joint forces of eight imperialist countries.

The Palace Museum's biggest dome came crashing down in 1937, when it was occupied by the then imperial Japanese army. During the eight years it was occupied, there is historical evidence to suggest the imperial army pillaged more than a ton of copper items from the palace to make bullets and cannon.

Yet the Palace Museum survived all the catastrophes. In the civil war that followed, the city was peacefully liberated for preservation of cultural relics inside, and that's how the Palace Museum avoided further damage and returned to the hands of the people.

Now the Palace Museum is the busiest museum of the world, with 17 million visitors every year and a perseveration of over 1.8 million antiques. While enjoying this relic of human kind, it is advisable to pay respect to its 600 years of history that faithfully record what happened in this piece of soil.

记者：张周项

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