One storm, 1,142 stone dragon heads: where does the Forbidden City's water go? | Shenzhou 04
《神州大地》第 5 集 · 語言：English · 時長：14:49
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A heavy rain falls on the square

in front of the Hall of Supreme

Harmony. The drops hit three tiers of

white marble, and one thousand one hundred

and forty-two carved stone dragon heads start

spouting water at the same time.

The rain stops. The water keeps moving

southward, along the lie of the ground,

through drains buried under the paving,

into a river at the southeast corner

of the city.How does a city

like this make water leave, and keep

wood from burning?

For six hundred years this city has

been doing two things: sending water out,

and keeping fire out.

The route the water takes is hidden

in the roofs, in the ground,

and in the stone channels underneath

one layer after another.

The defences against fire became vats in

the courtyards, walls between halls, and men

keeping watch in shifts.

The two meet in one place.

The bucket raised to put out a

fire comes out of the river that

carries the rain away.

The palace roofs are covered in glazed

tiles, laid in ridges.

Rain lands on the tiles, runs down

each ridge and drips from the eaves.

That is the first layer.

The second layer is the ground.

Courtyards inside the palace are not level:

the middle is higher than the sides,

and the north is higher than the

south.Ground near the Gate of Divine

Might stands about forty-six metres above sea

level; near the Meridian Gate, about forty-four.

From north to south, the whole city

tilts gently downward.So the water needs

no lifting and no pumps.

It goes south on its own.

The square in front of the Hall of

Supreme Harmony is the clearest case.

The ceremonial ramp down its centre,

two point two metres wide, is the

highest line in the square; water runs

off it east and west, into the

open channels on either side.

Those channels are open stone troughs.

Where they meet a terrace or a

building, the water passes underneath through a

stone culvert. The records call that culvert

the channel eye.Past the channel eye

it becomes a covered drain — buried,

and out of sight.

The drains are graded: branch drains collect

water from the courtyards, trunk drains gather

the branches, and all of it ends

in the Inner Golden Water River.

From the roof to the river,

the system needs no power.

The three tiers of white marble beneath

the first three halls carry one thousand

one hundred and forty-two carved stone dragon

heads. That number is the Palace Museum's

own published figure.When the rain reaches

a certain volume, water collects through openings

at the base of the balustrades,

feeds into the heads, and shoots from

their mouths. People call it a thousand

dragons spitting water.The heads are not

ornaments. They are the part of this

drainage system that stands closest to the

visitor.

Building the water route was only the

beginning. How long it kept working depended

on whether anyone went on clearing it.

Both the Ming and the Qing required

the palace channels to be dredged on

schedule. Under the Qing it was mostly

every March.Who was responsible?

In the Ming, the Fuel Office,

one of the twenty-four directorates.

In the Qing, the Palace Works Office

under the Imperial Household Department.

The Fuel Office's own job was the

firewood and charcoal burned in the palace.

Dredging was not its business — it was

an extra duty it carried.

The later name was not there from

the beginning either. Under the Shunzhi emperor

the office was still called the Fuel

Office; in 1677, the sixteenth year of Kangxi,

it was renamed the Palace Works Office

and became a department for construction.

So for a long stretch, responsibility for

a water system sat with an office

that had been set up for firewood

and charcoal.The last large clearing under

the Qing began in April 1885, the eleventh

year of Guangxu, and took two years.

It lifted silt from about two thousand

one hundred metres of the Inner Golden

Water River and roughly eight thousand metres

of channels and drains, and repaired the

river walls and fifteen bridges.

One thing we could not find:

which regulation punished a failure to dredge,

and what the penalty was.

In the summaries that are publicly available,

the text of that article is not

there.We could not find it.

All the water ends in one river:

the Inner Golden Water River.

Its source is outside the city,

at Jade Spring Hill.

It comes through Shichahai and Beihai,

enters the palace by the northwest water

gate, follows the western wall south,

turns east in front of the Gate

of Martial Valor, crosses the square before

the Gate of Supreme Harmony, and leaves

the palace at the southeast water gate.

The total length is about two kilometres.

Three jobs hang on that one river.

First, it is the main drain:

the whole city's water is handed to

it.Second, it is the firefighting supply:

when something burns inside the palace,

the nearest water is often this river.

Third, it is a transport route:

some of the great timbers and stone

for building the halls came in along

it.The three jobs collide.

To dredge the river, you cannot draw

water from it at the same time;

to float timber, the silt has to

be cleared first.Which comes first,

and how it is arranged, lands back

on the desk of that same office.

Fire has to be met with water.

But running from the river to a

fire takes time, so the water was

moved into the courtyards first.

The containers are large vats — bronze and

iron. They carry several names: the peace

vat, the auspicious vat, the gate sea.

According to the Collected Statutes of the

Great Qing, the palace once held three

hundred and eight of them.

Two hundred and thirty-one remain today,

eighteen of them gilt bronze.

The highest grade — the gilt bronze vats

stood on either side of the Hall

of Supreme Harmony and the Hall of

Preserving Harmony, and outside the Gate of

Heavenly Purity. In the inner palaces and

along the long streets, smaller bronze or

iron vats were set out.

One vat stands about one point two

metres high, about one point six metres

across, and holds roughly three thousand litres.

The water in the vats was managed

by the Imperial Household Department.

Early each morning, servants drew water from

the palace wells and filled the vats,

load by load.In winter, the water

freezes. So after the first light snow,

eunuchs wrapped the vats in padded covers

and put the lids on; and on

the marble base under each vat a

brazier of charcoal was set, burning day

and night until the following spring,

at the first stirring of insects.

The Guangxu edition of the Collected Statutes

wrote this into regulation: from the first

day of the eleventh month to the

thirtieth of the first month, servants burned

charcoal under the vats, one man to

three vats; from the first day of

the second month to the thirtieth of

the tenth, each vat was topped up

twice a month.Keeping the water warm

was one component of the system:

the water had to be usable at

any moment.

The Forbidden City is a city of

wood. Wood burns.The record is clear.

In 1421, the nineteenth year of Yongle,

lightning struck the three great halls and

burned them; rebuilding finished in 1441.

In 1557, the thirty-sixth year of Jiajing,

lightning struck them again and the fire

spread to the Meridian Gate; the work

was done five years later.

In 1597, the twenty-fifth year of Wanli,

fire struck once more, and the rebuilding

was finished in 1627.The most detailed account

is from the third day of the

twelfth month, 1679, the eighteenth year of

Kangxi: a fire started in the western

kitchen, spread past the Rear Right Gate

and the Middle Right Gate, and ran

along the connected side galleries to the

Hall of Supreme Harmony.

The hall burned to ash.

Afterwards, six people connected with the fire

were executed by strangulation.

The rebuilding took a long time to

prepare. From 1682, the twenty-first year of Kangxi,

timber was collected in the provinces and

bricks and tiles were stockpiled; the actual

work began thirteen years later.

Ground was broken on 25 February 1695, the thirty-fourth

year of Kangxi; the work finished on

18 July 1697, the thirty-sixth year, at a cost

of more than two million taels of

silver.All of the craftsmen were hired,

organised by the officials supervising the work;

the Ministry of Works and the Imperial

Household Department watched the schedule together.

When the rebuilding was done, one thing

in the palace had changed: the side

galleries flanking the Hall of Supreme Harmony

were rebuilt as brick walls.

Wood had burned, so brick and stone

were used to hold fire back from

the next hall.Eighty years later,

in the Qianlong period, the Wenyuan Pavilion

was built to hold the Complete Library

of the Four Treasuries.

It was placed deliberately on the north

bank of the Inner Golden Water River:

if fire came from the south,

the first thing it met was the

river.And the vats were only one

item. In 1723, the first year of Yongzheng,

a fire watch was set up,

with a hundred men picked from the

guards for night duty.

In 1727, the fifth year of Yongzheng,

eight water pumps were fixed as standard;

by 1815, the twentieth year of Jiaqing,

thirty-one western-style pumps stood at posts across

the palace.Water, equipment, people, and the

building's own firebreaks — all four in place

at once is what makes it a

system.

More than ninety per cent of the

rainwater still goes through the old channels;

what modern hands have altered is under

ten per cent.Every spring, summer and

autumn, the Palace Museum clears silt,

working area by area; the whole complex

comes round in four to five years.

The old schedule left by the Ming

and the Qing is still followed:

weed in spring, fill in summer,

clear the leaves in autumn, cut the

ice in winter.In summer, seventy-two vats

in closed areas are filled, about two

thousand litres each, as the first bucket

of water when a fire starts.

In winter, holes a metre square are

cut in the ice on the Inner

Golden Water River and the moat every

twenty metres, and re-cut every three days.

The palace has its own firefighting force

as well. The special station of the

Tiananmen area fire and rescue detachment divides

the complex into one hundred and twenty-six

courtyards — one plan for each — and can

reach any corner in three minutes.

Then is the saying "the Forbidden City

has not flooded in six hundred years"

correct?Shan Jixiang, a former director of

the Palace Museum, explained it publicly in 2016:

the ground is high in the north

and low in the south, and with

the network of open and covered channels,

"however heavy the rain, there is no

problem of standing water".

On the other side, the monitoring department

of the same museum has described another

part of the record publicly: the historical

documents do contain entries on standing water.

In April 1885, the eleventh year of Guangxu,

water stood "from one foot to several

feet" in places between the East Glorious

Gate and the West Glorious Gate.

In 2023, the Palace of Compassion and Tranquility

took on water during a heavy storm

and recovered after the drains were cleared;

what had blocked the covered drains was

plastic bottles, plastic bags, towels and clothing.

The museum's administrative office puts it this

way: a more accurate version of "no

standing water for six hundred years" is

"even when water stands, it drains away

quickly".Both accounts are here.

Which one is closer to the facts

is yours to judge.

Water falls on the roofs, reaches the

ground, passes from the open channels into

the covered drains, then into the river

and out of the city.

What moves it is the slope,

the graded channels, and people who kept

clearing them.Wood burns, so the palace

brought in vats, kept men on duty,

stored equipment, and used brick walls to

separate one hall from the next.

Keep the water where it belongs,

and fire does not take hold.

And where does the water itself come

from? Every drop inside the walls was

carried in from outside them.

That is another line.

This is our reading, not the record

itself. The full transcript is at sylogs.com.

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Source: sylogs.com