BEIJING – For 600 years, the Forbidden City, with its vermilion walls, labyrinthine passageways and sloping tiled roofs, has stood in the heart of Beijing as the ultimate symbol of power, the inner sanctum from which authority emanates across a vast land.
It is the last place one would imagine as a base for the overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party.
Yet, photographs have circulated on the Internet over the last few days that seem to hint at exactly that. On Friday, officials in charge of management of the Forbidden City handed two ceremonial banners to local police officers to congratulate them on nabbing a thief who had stolen curios from an exhibition at the ancient palace earlier this month. The slogan on one of the banners said: “To shake the great strength and prosperity of the motherland, and to safeguard the stability of the capital.”
The treasonous slogan instantly set the Chinese Internet aflutter, spreading as quickly as court gossip.
Barring the possibility of a secret revolutionary cabal inside the palace, the problem has to do with a common headache in Mandarin Chinese: homonyms. The pronunciation of the word for “shake” – han, with a falling tone – is exactly the same as that for “guard,” even though the written characters are different. In other words, the first phrase should have read to “to guard” rather than “to shake.”
Embarrassingly, no officials at the ceremony seemed to notice the gaffe. Ji Tianbin, vice-director of the Forbidden City, handed out the banner, and Fu Zhenghua, head of the Beijing police, was in attendance.
By Monday, photos of the ceremony had ignited derision across the Internet. Many Chinese mocked the bad grammar of the person had designed the banner, and Chinese news organizations demanded an explanation.
The management office issued a brief apology on its microblog on Monday: The banners had been designed by the security department, it said, and no official had examined them “due to a lack of time.”
It added that the security department had defended the mistake and had refused to apologize. Officials have “investigated the incident and criticized and educated the security department,” the managers said.
The statement appeared to be a more honest appraisal of the situation than the response that one official surnamed Liu had offered Legal Mirror, a Beijing newspaper. Mr. Liu said over the weekend that no mistakes had been made and that an “expert” had looked over the wording. His defense was mocked in tens of thousands of online postings.
The episode of the banner was only the latest in a series of humiliations this month that has afflicted the most hallowed edifice in all of China. The first was the incident that led to the Beijing police being thanked with the banners: On May 8, a thief stole rare handicrafts that were part of an exhibition of objects from a private museum in Hong Kong called Liangyicang. The stolen valuables dated to the early 20th century and included jewelry boxes. The heist took place despite the fact that at least 1,600 anti-theft alarms, 3,700 smoke detectors and 3,700 cameras monitor the Forbidden City after it closes to the public at 5 p.m., Legal Mirror reported. The police eventually arrested a suspect.
Even more scandalous is talk that a luxury private club has been established in the Jianfu Pavilion, a part of the Forbidden City that has been restored through monies from a preservation fund in Hong Kong. The club’s membership, supposedly limited to 500 people, costs one million renminbi each, or $154,000, according to a microblog posting last week by Rui Chenggang, an anchor for China Central Television. Officials at the Forbidden City quickly denied the existence of any such club, but Beijing News reported on Sunday that an opening ceremony had already been held.
Chang Lingxing, a spokesman for Forbidden City, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that the management office had hired a private company, the Beijing Forbidden City Culture Development Company, to organize lectures and salons. Instead, the company had started handing out “membership sign-up forms.” The management office has told the company to stop, according to a written statement.
One microblog post making the rounds succinctly sums up the three humiliations: “The Forbidden City: the commercial company sold memberships without the officials’ permission; the security department printed the banner without the officials’ approval; the thief stole the exhibits without the officials’ approval!"
But perhaps one should not underestimate the enduring nature of the building. Geremie R. Barme, the prominent Australian scholar of China, wrote this in his book on the history of the Forbidden City: “While its buildings were subject to decay and change, the China of secretive politics, rigid political codes and autocratic behavior continued to exert an influence far beyond the walls of the former palace.”
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