This was once the imperial throne room of Manchu emperors, in Shenyang city in the Liaoning province
This was once the imperial throne room of Manchu emperors, in Shenyang city in the Liaoning province of northeast China. I took this photo in 2001, during a family pilgrimmage to our ancestral lands. My grandfather’s final wish was for our family to make this journey and to make donations to the schools he had attended, first as a child and later as a medical student. It took 10 years to organize, but it happened. In my family’s words, our trip not only fulfilled Yeye’s final wish but the contributions we were able to make carried his “body heat” back into the schools that had formed him.The Manchus were Central Asian horse people, like their neighboring allies the Mongols, who conquered all of China, under the Qing dynasty. They built the Mukden Palace, where the pictured throne room sits, in 1625. The first three Qing emperors lived there and sat on that throne. In 1644, the last Ming emperor in Beijing hanged himself as his dynasty collapsed under multiple strains (not least of which were the horse people of northern China, against whom the Great Wall had been built). The Manchus quickly consolidated power and claimed the Mandate of Heaven, and thus moved the throne to the imperial palace in Beijing, leaving behind the Mukden Palace in Shenyang. -- source link