Emperors actually lived in this kind of house to prolong their lives

There is a saying in ancient Feng Shui theory that "a large house with few people is an unlucky house" because a house attracts popularity. When a person uses so much energy to fill the space of a large house, the damage to the body can be imagined. When the body consumes more energy, its physical condition will naturally become weaker, and it will make you listless at work, which will inevitably lead to mistakes. Your judgment will decline, and bad things will follow.

The post also warned people who live in large rooms that they might not be able to have children. "In practice, we have found that the bedroom should be around 15 square meters, and no more than 20 square meters. Living in a room larger than 20 square meters will make it impossible to have children. Maybe this is not an absolute truth, but it is true to some extent. In fact, this is because the human body consumes too much energy, and physical fitness declines, which affects fertility. If the land is not fertile, of course, crops cannot be grown."

The post uses the emperor’s bedroom as an example. "When we walked into the Yangxinzhai in the Forbidden City and Emperor Yongzheng's study and the bedroom behind the study, we were surprised to find that the emperor's residence was not much larger than that of ordinary people, only more than 10 square meters. The 'dragon bed' was also not larger than that of ordinary people, and when sleeping, two curtains had to be lowered in front of the bed, so the space became even smaller, probably less than 10 square meters."

The emperor's bedroom is indeed not big. But is the reason for the smaller area really to prevent "big houses from attracting people"?

Experts from the Forbidden City said that Beijing has a warm temperate, semi-humid continental monsoon climate, with cold winters with little snow and dry springs with lots of wind and sand. Therefore, residential design focuses on insulation, cold protection, and avoiding wind and sand. Brick walls are built on the outside, and the entire courtyard is surrounded by houses and walls. The roof is a gabled style, and the walls and roof are relatively thick. The bedroom is small for no other purpose than to keep warm. Because during the Ming and Qing dynasties, the winter temperature in Beijing was generally below minus 10 degrees Celsius, which is much colder than Beijing after global warming. The characteristics of residential houses in the north are that they are low and narrow, with moderate proportions. The sun can shine into the house in winter, the main room is warm in winter and cool in summer, and the courtyard is a place for outdoor activities. Therefore, the emperor's space was not just the small bedroom, but the entire courtyard.

In fact, the Forbidden City is a large courtyard with red walls and yellow tiles. The roofs and walls of Beijing's courtyard houses are thick, which can block the wind and cold in winter and the heat in summer, making them warm in winter and cool in summer. Therefore, the Forbidden City's designs for keeping warm include: single-sided windows opening to the sun, warm kangs, warm walls, fire walls, and floor stoves, etc. This is not the case in the South. The climate in the south is hot and humid. Therefore, the walls of the rooms are high and the openings are large; the front and back doors are connected to facilitate ventilation; to prevent moisture, most of the houses are two-story buildings, with the ground floor being a brick structure and the upper floor being a wooden structure.

Of course, the emperor had no shortage of houses to live in, but the rooms in the Forbidden City could not be built as big as the emperor wanted. There were feng shui rules and room number requirements. A widely circulated saying among the people is "The imperial capital has nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine and a half houses." Why was there only half a room instead of an integer to build ten thousand rooms? Legend has it that there are ten thousand houses in the Heavenly Palace where the Jade Emperor lives. Although the emperor is the Son of Heaven, he cannot exceed the rules of the Heavenly Palace, and naturally the number of houses he lives in cannot exceed that of the Heavenly Palace.

Legends are just legends and have no scientific basis. A more convincing view is that in ancient China, yang numbers were large, and a large amount of data in the palace complex of the Forbidden City uses yang numbers. 1 is the smallest yang number, 9 is the largest yang number, and 5 is in the middle. "9999 and a half rooms" just fits the traditional idea of ​​"the supreme ruler", therefore, the number of palaces in the Forbidden City is 9999 and a half rooms. In 1972, ancient building experts calculated that there were 980 palaces in the Forbidden City, which covers an area of ​​720,000 square meters. Using the traditional Chinese method of calculating "four pillars and one room" for ancient buildings, there were 8,728 houses. Half room refers to the small room at the west end of Wenyuan Pavilion. Wenyuan Pavilion is the place where the first "Complete Library in Siku" is stored. In order to take the meaning of "Heaven gives one water and Earth makes up six", that is, water overcomes fire, Wenyuan Pavilion is built with an asymmetrical even number of rooms, contrary to the convention of the Forbidden City where most houses have an odd number of rooms, and adopts an asymmetrical even number of 6 rooms. But for the sake of a beautiful layout, the room on the west end was built particularly small, almost like half a room.