He Has Spent 10 Years Studying the Forbidden City: "Even Praise Should Have a Voice of Its Own" | 100 People With Ideas

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the Palace Museum, and the 10th year Zhao Guangchao has spent studying the Forbidden City. "If something moves you," he says, "and you don't do anything about it, heaven takes it back and gives it to someone fit to hold on to that feeling."

Zhao Guangchao was born in the 1950s in Kam Tin, in Hong Kong's New Territories, the son of a rice shop owner.

Eight years ago, he stood for the first time on the Hall of Supreme Harmony in Beijing's Forbidden City. This Ming-dynasty palace, wrapped in smog, had been turned into a museum and opened to ordinary people 90 years earlier. Looking down from the top of the hall, Zhao thought back to the stories of emperors, the history of the imperial city, and the fate of China that he had read about as a boy in Kam Tin.

That day, Zhao felt, he walked out of rural Hong Kong and "saw a balanced universe."

At 48, Zhao resigned his professorship at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and went to Beijing to see the place for himself. "If something moves you, and you don't do anything about it, heaven takes it back and gives it to someone fit to hold on to that feeling," Zhao says. Over the following decade he came and went from the Forbidden City, writing books including The Great Forbidden City — The Axis of Kings (《大紫禁城——王者的轴线》), Twelve Beauties (《十二美人》), and Forbidden City 100 (《紫禁城 100》).

If not for his clumsy Hong Kong-accented Mandarin and his romantic turns of phrase, in his blue plaid shirt, sitting here in Dawanglu, nine kilometers east of the Forbidden City, he could pass for an old Beijing local.

Not long after The Great Forbidden City came out in Hong Kong in 2005, a user named "Secretdada" reviewed it on Douban. "If I read A Heap of Brocade Ashes (《锦灰堆》) at 5 pages a day, I want to read Zhao Guangchao's book at 30 pages a day," Secretdada wrote, adding that he could not wait to buy a copy on the mainland.

If you remember Wang Shixiang's A Heap of Brocade Ashes, then yes, Zhao's books do resemble it. Like Wang's, they are full of novel insights and of illustrations he drew himself. Into More Than Chinese Wooden Architecture (《不只中国木建筑》) Zhao put more than 500 images; into The Great Forbidden City, more than 200.

Some of Zhao's readers treat his books as craft objects. Liang Wendao, a well-known figure in Hong Kong's cultural media, praised the oversized first edition of The Great Forbidden City as a "kung fu book" — text, illustrations, and design all done single-handedly by Zhao.

"He created a new way of making books," Liang said.

Jiang Ying of the Forbidden City Publishing House has worked with Zhao since 2007. She edited the English edition of The Great Forbidden City first, then the simplified-Chinese edition. She says she likes Zhao a great deal, "because his design style and his way with language are unlike any other Forbidden City book on the market. His books are light and easy to read — they fill a gap," Jiang told QDaily.

The difference is the one between Zhao's A Chapter on the "Wooden Chair" (《一章“木椅”》) and Wang Shixiang's A Study of Ming-Style Furniture (《明式家具研究》), or between The Great Forbidden City and Yu Zhuoyun's The Palaces of the Forbidden City (《紫禁城宫殿》) — the reading pace is worlds apart.

"Once, the worry was that it would leak; today, the worry is that it holds water." In one of Zhao's books, a small cat looks up expectantly beside one of the Forbidden City's great water vats. The picture alone was not enough for Zhao, so he added the line as well.

Describing the thresholds of the palace halls, Zhao explains: "In the late Qing, the boy emperor Puyi had the thresholds of most of the halls sawed off so he could ride his bicycle more easily." The illustration shows a tiny figure in sunglasses and fine robes hunched over a bicycle, backside high in the air.

An illustration from The Great Forbidden City

Zhao introduces the Forbidden City through humor on purpose, because these ancient Chinese objects need "new life." Over the years he has piled up odd ideas: that cutting down an old tree and looking at the cross-section is like looking at a DVD; that the Forbidden City is the terminal of Ming and Qing culture; that the gardens of Suzhou were the world's earliest installation art, and so on.

Zhao's father died young. From the time he was small he delivered rice for the family in Kam Tin, and whenever he was free he ran to the mobile library van to read. In the second grade he got through Legend of the White Snake and, without really understanding it, used the story to work out what love was.

After high school, Zhao wanted to study art in France. He scraped money together from every direction, applied for scholarships, and finally stood in front of the originals in the Louvre. He was stunned — the paintings had depth and light, nothing like what he had seen in art books back in Hong Kong — and he decided on the spot that he had to "cut through every limit and start again from zero."

He studied painting at the fine arts academy in Besançon and at the University of Paris I. After ten years, becoming an artist and staying on in France looked easy enough, and friends and relatives urged him to take French citizenship.

In older interviews with the press, he described his thinking at the time: "Art isn't a job, it's a question of essence. Why spend so long proving your own essence? I don't think someone else should be the one to confirm it." In the 1990s, Zhao returned to Hong Kong to teach art and design.

Zhao Guanglong, Zhao Guangchao's brother and chairman of the Coral Springs Chinese Cultural Association in Florida, says: "The two of us each set off to look for the other piece of the puzzle, and along the way we came to understand both cultures whole."

Zhao did change his earlier views on art and culture — but only after he saw Chinese painting, at which point his "legs went weak." Chinese painting pulls every outward force back in and binds it inside a single line, and that filled him with awe. By the later years of his studies in Europe, he could no longer accept the idea that "Western art is the ultimate mainstream of human culture."

As soon as Zhao got back to Hong Kong, he bought a plane ticket to Beijing.

In his first years in Beijing, Zhao knew almost no one. Every morning, the moment the Forbidden City opened, he bought a ticket and went in with the tourists, watching and taking notes. In his own words, inside the Forbidden City he was always "curious and moved." By the time his money ran out, he had produced The Great Forbidden City — The Axis of Kings.

Because of that book, the Palace Museum let Zhao into the archives and let him put questions to its experts for his research. Summers in the Forbidden City are fierce, with temperatures reaching 38 or 39 degrees Celsius. Jiang Ying of the Forbidden City Publishing House remembers Zhao walking his students back and forth under the blazing sun, chasing questions an outsider would think trivial.

Out of that came two later books, A Map of the Forbidden City's Court Atmosphere (《紫禁城宫廷情调地图》) and Twelve Beauties. From 2011 he also served as art director on the CCTV documentary series Forbidden City 100 (《故宫 100》).

Forbidden City 100, newly published

Every illustration is hand-drawn by Zhao Guangchao and his studio colleagues

An illustration from Forbidden City 100

Forbidden City 100

Zhao also began spending more time making books for children. In 2010, his design and cultural studies studio worked with the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation to launch the publication and exhibition "My Home Is in the Forbidden City." To finish the book, Zhao brought in the Hong Kong book designer Lu Zhichang (who also worked with him on the simplified-Chinese edition of The Great Forbidden City and on Twelve Beauties), along with Xie Liwen and Mai Jiabi, the creators of McDull.

Their central idea was to turn difficult culture into something fun. Zhao named the material that had to go into the text; Xie Liwen, drawing on years of writing children's stories, cut out whatever children would not understand.

The Best Palace (《最好的皇宫》), written for children

An illustration from The Best Palace, made for children

The collaboration worked. In the end, "My Home Is in the Forbidden City" came to seven small books, funny and lively, covering the origins, the history, and the look of the Forbidden City. Alongside them, the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation also backed an exhibition, and the studio made animations and multimedia games.

Most of these books are not cheap. Some readers complain that Zhao's The Great Forbidden City is thin on actual content and closer to a "bookbinding art object," nowhere near Yu Zhuoyun's The Palaces of the Forbidden City.

More readers disagree. They often finish A Chapter on the "Wooden Chair" and go straight to The Great Forbidden City, and from then on "have no more hesitation, and decide to collect and read everything else Mr. Zhao has written"; or they suddenly get back an interest in Ming-dynasty furniture and the Forbidden City.

"After A Chapter on the 'Wooden Chair', I went straight out and bought Wang Shixiang's A Study of Ming-Style Furniture. And that long-forgotten copy of The Palaces of the Forbidden City, edited by Yu Zhuoyun, sitting on my shelf — not long after I opened The Great Forbidden City, I dug it out in the middle of the night and read most of it alongside, comparing the two," one Douban reader wrote.

Cultural expression always has its depths and its surfaces, its wide view and its close one, and Zhao knows it. When his master's students once wanted to work on a topic about minimalism, Zhao sent them to study Southern Song porcelain instead. Under the strict Neo-Confucian culture of the time, that porcelain held every human passion and desire inside it and still looked perfectly calm.

"It isn't poverty. It's the capacity for a high degree of purification," Zhao says.

Cover image: from Forbidden City 100, Forbidden City Publishing House