The number of the beasts engraved in the ridges of the imperial palaces was usually 9. The ridges of the Hall of Supreme, however, are embossed with 10 beasts.

Another riddle was the number of doornails. It was an established rule to have all together 81 nails on every door in the imperial palace. There are usually 9 rows and 9 nails in every row. However, on some doors in the Forbidden City, there were only 8 rows, which obviously were not design or building mistakes.

 The Golden Section Rule

The Golden Section has been referred to as the Divine Proportion, or the Golden Rectangle. This proportion has been demonstrated in the Greek architecture of the Parthenon and the Renaissance architecture in Florence.

Fu Xinian's measurement shows the design and construction of the Forbidden City complies with the Golden Section Rule. The courtyard where the Gate of Supreme Harmony lies in is 200 meters long and 130 meters wide, with a ratio of width to length reaching 0.65 (65 to 35). This number is somewhere near 0.618, the Golden Section Ratio.

Also, with the distance from the Da Ming Gate to the Jing Mountain reaching 2.5 kilos, and the distance from the Da Ming Gate to the center of the Hall of Supreme Harmony hitting 1.5045 kilos, the ratio of 1.5045 to 2.5 amounts to 0.618, which is exactly the Golden Section Ratio. ]

There is no clear proof that the design of Chinese palaces was influenced by Western architectural ideas. Anyway, the employment of the Golden Section Rule in both China and the West is a testifies to its reasonableness, and also reveals that human beings, regardless of nationalities, share commonness in the pursuit of beauty.