IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 292

The Forbidden City, the vast palace complex at the heart of Beijing, was built in the early fifteenth century on the orders of the Yongle Emperor, the third ruler of the Ming dynasty. Construction began in 1406, and the palace was completed in 1420, when the court moved from Nanjing to the new northern capital. The layout was intended to mirror the cosmos, with the emperor's residence at its centre. The name by which it is known in the West translates a Chinese phrase meaning 'purple forbidden city'; purple referred to the pole star, the fixed point around which the heavens appear to turn.

The scale of the project was enormous. Hundreds of thousands of labourers, craftsmen and soldiers are said to have been conscripted, and materials were brought from every corner of the empire. The great columns of the principal halls were cut from nanmu, a fragrant hardwood found in the remote forests of the south-west, and dragged overland or floated along canals to Beijing. Floors were laid with bricks fired in kilns near Suzhou, which were so hard and smooth that they were known as golden bricks; white marble came from quarries at Fangshan, and the roof tiles were glazed in the imperial yellow.

The complex is a rectangle measuring about 960 metres from north to south and 750 metres from east to west, covering some 72 hectares. It is enclosed by a wall about eight metres high and more than three kilometres long, and beyond the wall lies a moat 52 metres wide. Within this boundary stood more than 8,000 rooms, although popular tradition prefers the tidier figure of 9,999 and a half. Visitors enter from the south and pass northwards through a sequence of gates and courtyards, an arrangement intended to emphasise the emperor's authority as the approach grows steadily grander.

The ceremonial heart of the palace is a group of three halls standing on a three-tiered terrace of white marble. The largest, the Hall of Supreme Harmony, is about 35 metres high and was used for the most important occasions, such as an emperor's birthday or the announcement of a military campaign; few people other than the emperor himself ever entered it. Behind it, the Hall of Central Harmony served as a place of preparation, and the Hall of Preserving Harmony, at the northern end of the terrace, was used for banquets and, in later years, for the final stage of the imperial examinations.

North of the three halls lies the inner court, where the emperor and his household lived. Here were the private palaces, the gardens, the libraries and the small courtyards in which the business of the court was conducted behind closed doors. Twenty-four emperors ruled from the Forbidden City in all: fourteen of the Ming dynasty and ten of the Qing, who took Beijing in 1644 and occupied the palace for the following two and a half centuries. Each dynasty altered and rebuilt parts of the complex, so that much of what survives today reflects Qing rebuilding as well as Ming foundations.

Access to the palace was strictly controlled. Ordinary residents of Beijing had no right to enter, and even senior officials were admitted only to particular areas at particular times. The emperor's household included thousands of servants, guards and scholars, together with large numbers of eunuchs, who carried out much of the administrative work of the court and whose influence at certain periods became a source of political tension. Foreign envoys were received with elaborate ceremony and were rarely permitted to see more than the outermost courtyards.

The palace ceased to be the seat of government after the revolution of 1911, when the last Qing emperor, the child Puyi, abdicated. Under the agreement that ended the dynasty, Puyi was allowed to remain in the inner court with his household, while the outer buildings passed to the new republic. He stayed until 1924, when he was expelled, and the following year the Palace Museum was established and the gates were opened to the public.

War soon threatened the collection. In 1933, as Japanese forces advanced, the most valuable objects were packed into thousands of crates and moved south and west by rail, road and river, beginning a journey that lasted more than a decade. When the government retreated to Taiwan in 1949, part of this collection went with it and eventually formed the core of the National Palace Museum in Taipei, which opened in 1965. The remainder stayed in Beijing, where it was returned to the palace.

UNESCO inscribed the Forbidden City on the World Heritage List in 1987, describing it as the largest surviving example of ancient Chinese palace architecture. Since then visitor numbers have risen into the many millions each year, and the pressures of tourism have forced the authorities to introduce timed tickets and daily limits. Conservation work has also accelerated, with craftsmen trained in traditional techniques repairing roofs and repainting walls. Some administrative offices and storerooms have been cleared out of the historic buildings to reduce the risk of fire.

What draws visitors is not only the architecture but the completeness of the ensemble: a single, self-contained city within a city, laid out to express a political and religious order that endured for five centuries and shaped the imagination of East Asia long after the last emperor left. Its courtyards and gates remain a statement about power, made in stone and timber.

Until the nineteenth century, most green space in European cities was closed to the public. Kings and nobles kept hunting parks and private gardens, and the formal squares of Georgian towns were reserved for the residents of the houses around them. Where townspeople could walk among trees and flowers, they usually paid for the privilege: the pleasure gardens of London and other cities charged an entrance fee and offered music, refreshments and entertainments alongside the plants. In the crowded industrial cities of the early 1800s, where smoke and poor sanitation were everyday facts of life, such places were beyond the means of most inhabitants.

The first park to be given to a town specifically for public use was the Derby Arboretum, which opened on 16 September 1840. It was the gift of Joseph Strutt, a wealthy textile manufacturer and former mayor, who paid for the land to be laid out and then handed it to the town council.

The design was the work of John Claudius Loudon, a prolific writer on gardening who planned the planting as a collection of labelled trees and shrubs, so that the park would instruct visitors as well as refresh them. Admission was free on two days of the week and cost a penny on the others, a charge intended to keep out those who might damage the grounds.

Seven years later, Birkenhead Park on the opposite side of the river from Liverpool became the first park in Britain to be paid for with public money. The town's commissioners bought the land and borrowed heavily to finance the work, which was designed by Joseph Paxton, the head gardener at Chatsworth. Paxton drained marshy ground, created two lakes and laid out winding paths and rockwork, and he insisted that the park should be open to everyone without charge. It opened on 5 April 1847 and was immediately popular, though the debt it created weighed on the town's finances for years.

Public parks were not, however, entirely new. The Englischer Garten in Munich had been open to all since 1789, when the Elector Karl Theodor ordered a former hunting ground beside the river Isar to be turned into a landscape garden for the city. In London, Regent's Park was laid out from 1811 by John Nash as part of a grand scheme of terraces and villas, but for its first decades it was a private estate rather than a public amenity: the gardens were surrounded by iron railings, locked at night and open only to residents and their guests.

The American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted visited Birkenhead in 1850 and was struck by what he saw. He recorded his impressions in a published account and later recalled that the park had convinced him of what a democratic society might offer its citizens. In 1858 he and the architect Calvert Vaux won the competition to design Central Park in New York with a plan known as the Greensward. Their design, with its meadows, winding carriage drives and sunken transverse roads, drew on the English model, and the park's construction gave work to thousands of unemployed men during a period of economic hardship.

Paris followed a different route. Between 1853 and 1870 the prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann, working with the engineer Adolphe Alphand, rebuilt the city's open spaces. Alphand's parks were deliberately dramatic, using levels and viewpoints to create variety: the Buttes-Chaumont, opened in 1867, was laid out on the site of a former quarry and rubbish dump, with cliffs, a lake and a temple perched on a crag. The Bois de Boulogne on the western edge of the city, redesigned at the same time, offered Parisians a wooded landscape on the edge of their city.

Victorian parks came with rules. Gates were opened at dawn and closed at dusk, and uniformed park keepers enforced a long list of bye-laws. Drinking alcohol, gambling and political meetings were prohibited, and drivers of carriages were required to keep to particular routes. Historians have shown that these regulations were not merely practical: many of those who promoted parks believed that orderly behaviour in a pleasant setting would improve the manners of the working classes. Some parks also provided separate areas, or separate opening times, for different social groups, a practice that has since been criticised.

Historians disagree about how much good the parks actually did. For much of the twentieth century they were described as the lungs of the city, an image that implied a direct benefit to public health, yet the evidence is difficult to interpret: those who lived nearest the parks were also likely to be better housed and better fed. A newer body of research emphasises the commercial motives behind many schemes, since a park could raise the value of surrounding land. Others argue that both things were true at once, and that the parks should be understood as an expression of civic pride as much as of medical belief.

Public parks are now judged by different standards. Many of the Victorian parks, having lost the staff who once maintained them, depend on volunteers and charitable trusts, and the question of who pays for them has returned. The arguments of the 1840s have not vanished: those who defend free access today make much the same case that was made for Birkenhead, while others suggest that users should contribute towards the cost, whether through a voluntary donation or a charge for parking on the edge of the park.

Every few years someone proposes that schools should teach the history of food. The suggestion is rarely controversial in itself; what provokes argument is what such teaching would displace. Supporters present the subject as a way of making the past concrete, while critics see it as a fashionable addition to a timetable that is already overcrowded. Having followed the debate for some time, I think both sides are partly right, and that the disagreement largely dissolves once we stop imagining food history as a separate subject.

The case for the subject rests on the fact that everybody eats. A pupil who finds the Ming dynasty remote may still be interested in what a Ming farmer ate, how the food was preserved and who did the cooking. Through food, large historical processes become visible: the trade routes that carried sugar, tea and spices; the voyages that brought the potato and the tomato from the Americas to Europe; the industrialisation that moved milling and brewing out of the home; the rationing that shaped the diets of several generations in the twentieth century. These are not decorative details. They connect economic history, technology, migration and empire, and they can be taught with objects and documents that survive in large quantities.

Historians of food make a further claim: that recipes and household accounts are sources in their own right. A cookery book lists ingredients that were affordable in a particular place at a particular time; a kitchen inventory shows which implements existed; a menu records what a family wished to be seen eating. Read carefully, these documents reveal prices, labour, class and aspiration. The historian's skill is to make such mundane records yield arguments, and this is precisely the skill that history teaching exists to develop.

Campaigners for local produce take a different view. For them the point of food history is identity: a child who knows why a particular cheese or loaf belongs to a particular valley, they argue, is more likely to value it and to defend the landscape that produced it. Sympathetic as I am to this, it risks turning history into heritage, and heritage into marketing.

Teachers, however, have a practical objection. The history timetable is already crowded, and any new topic must be paid for by dropping something else. Several teachers I have spoken to describe the curriculum as a container that is filled to the brim, and they point out that food history, badly taught, can become a list of colourful facts about banquets with no analytical purpose. Their worry is reasonable, and it should shape any proposal rather than being brushed aside.

Nutritionists raise a different objection. Their concern is behaviour rather than knowledge: children already know a good deal about food, they argue, and what many of them need is the practical ability, and the money, to eat better. Time spent on the past, in this view, is time not spent on cooking, on reading labels or on understanding why a diet of processed food is cheap and damaging. This is a serious point, but it rests on an assumption that deserves scrutiny — that knowledge of history and knowledge of nutrition compete for the same few hours.

In fact the two are connected. The British diet of the mid-twentieth century was transformed by rationing, by the growth of supermarkets and by the marketing of prepared foods, and none of these developments can be understood without their history. Pupils who learn how the price and availability of food changed over the past century are better placed to judge claims about what is natural or traditional. A nutrition lesson that treats current eating habits as a matter of individual choice, without asking how those habits were formed, is likely to be less effective than one that does.

There is a danger, though, and it is one that the subject's enthusiasts rarely acknowledge. Food history attracts nostalgia. The phrase traditional cooking often conceals a diet that was monotonous, seasonal and sometimes inadequate, and rural poverty is easily repackaged as wholesome simplicity. Museum educators, who have done much of the best work in this field, are careful about this: they let children handle a Victorian grain measure or read a wartime recipe leaflet, and then ask them what the object does not tell us. That habit of questioning the evidence is worth more than any amount of picturesque detail.

So how should it be done? Not as a new subject, and not as an addition to cookery lessons, which have their own purposes. The most sensible arrangement is to embed food within the history that is already taught: a unit on trade might use a grocer's ledger, a unit on the Second World War might use a ration book, and a local study might record the memories of grandparents. Cheap and widely available sources of this kind exist in every town, and they require no new textbooks.

My conclusion, then, is that the history of food should be taught, but as history. Its value lies not in making pupils feel warmly about the past, nor in improving their diets directly, but in giving them a familiar object — a meal — and showing them how much can be learned from it about trade, technology, work and power. Taught in that spirit, it is neither a soft option nor a distraction. It is one of the most direct routes into the discipline that history teaching exists to defend.