The capital of China for six centuries and the center of the world's most continuously inhabited civilization — a city whose built environment embeds a complete cosmological and political order and whose contemporary significance is inseparable from the authoritarian state that now occupies it.
The Forbidden City sits at the center of Beijing, which sat at the center of China, which understood itself for centuries as the center of the world. That geometry was not accidental — it was built into every stone of a city designed to express and enforce an entire cosmological order.