BUILDING A NEW FORBIDDEN CITY HISTORY TOURISM CHINA

The Forbidden City covers an area of about 72 hectares(178 acres) with a total floor space of approximately 150, 000 square meters(1,614,000 square feet); and it's rectangular in shape, 960 meters long from north to south and 750 meters from east to west, with a 10-meter high city wall surrounded, and encircled by a 52-meter wide moat. There are unique and delicately structured towers on each of the four corners of the curtain wall. These afford views over both the palace and the city outside. The popular saying is that there are 9,999 rooms just one less than the Purple Palace in the heaven. However, the fact is that according to the statistics Forbidden Cityin 1973, it consists of 90 palaces and courtyards, 980 buildings and 8,704 rooms. To represent the supreme power of the emperor from the God and the place where he lived being the center of the world, all the gates, palaces and other structures of the Forbidden City were arranged on both sides of the south-north central axis.

Beijing served as the capital of 5 dynasties over a period of 800 years. Start your city tour with a visit to the Tiananmen Square, the largest public square in the world. Next stop is the Forbidden City. This complex, the largest and most intact conglomeration of ancient structures of the imperial palace ever built in the world, features more than 800 buildings with 9999 rooms, resplendent golden-glazed roofs, red lacquered pillars and vermilion walls. In the afternoon, continue your tour to the Temple of Heaven, which was used by Emperors to offer sacrifices to heaven and pray for good harvest in ancient times. In the evening, enjoy a fabulous Peking Roast Duck Banquet. Back to hotel for rest or attend an optional energetic show-- “Legend of Kung-fu” at your own expense.

In 1964, The People’s Republic of China initiated a massive effort to construct a new frontier of industrialism in the rugged mountainous terrain of the Southwestern provinces of Guizhou, Sichuan and Yunnan. Literally tucked away in the theretofore uncharted territory of China’s far reaches, these huge complexes were easy to defend in times of international political uncertainty, and just as importantly, were perfectly situated to make use of the untapped natural resources to be found there. During the course of the factories’ construction and operation, millions of workers were relocated to these cities comprising China’s “Third Front,” creating economic boomtowns overnight that performed around the clock fabricating military equipment and marketable goods in droves.

Yet, in light of governmental reforms made in the mid-1980s that marked China’s slow shift to a market
economy, the Third Front disappeared almost overnight—and just as quickly as it had been erected in the first place. In a matter of years, these factories and cities no longer had a function in the new economy, and as they closed, the workers who once labored there returned in hordes to their hometowns, quite literally leaving a series of ghost towns behind in their wake. To this day, many of these industrial behemoths and the cities that were built around them to shelter and nourish the local labor force stand either sparsely populated or fully
abandoned. The sustenance that once fed the machine of industry has been erased, leaving only the empty facade of its making to history and those who stumble into its midst.

Chen Jiagang, a former architect, businessman and curator, has taken the Third Front as the subject matter of his first extensive body of works, using photography as his means of capturing the specters of industry that still reside there. His monumental pictures tell a story of the industrial and human activities that took place in these remote areas, of the grit and human toil that once powered China’s military end economic engines. Sweeping in size and powerful in scale, Chen’ s large photographs capture not only the vacant factories dotting the
landscape of the Third Front, but also the terrain within which they were constructed as well as scars in the form of the mines and quarries that they left behind.

Often times, Chen situates a lone beauty in traditional garb in the image, a gorgeous foil to the intense labor
that took place there, as well as an urban representative of the Beijingbased governmental bodies that both initiated the Front, and profited from it. Chen further complicates the binarism of man versus nature and indeed the whole of Chinese art history that so often turns to man’s relationship with nature as a prime subject—by literally fabricating the images frame by frame from large-format photographs shot on location.
Although the final picture appears to be one seamless image, it is in fact made up of many photographs connected digitally, or manipulated in such a way that the impossible appears to be real. Chen’s mastery of
the technologic processes of the 21st-century emerges victorious over those of the mid- to late-20th-century; art prevails over industry, and not the other way around.