To the Future You

Hi there!

Just as the Forbidden City has been kept intact for six hundred years already, hope this website would also stay well in the virtual space. Whenever it flashes upon your mind, come browse it. When you grow older, you could still come and visit it – revisit the stories that we told you when you were once little. After that, it will soon be the time for you to think about how you would retell the stories to your own children!

Basically everything in the Palace Museum is alive. When you were still little, this world has become not quite real. Gradually people have stopped holding hands; there are less and less animals; plants are only seen on posters or screens, if not in parks. To best describe our lives that have quickly drifted further away from the idea of being alive, the meaning of the word “alive” has to be changed promptly. Each of these incidences triggers us to think. Everyone of us inevitably has something that we cherish. The treasure represents some stories, memories or something of significant values. The Forbidden City, now a museum, is in itself a gigantic piece of treasure that carries the most invaluable years of both the Ming and Qing Dynasty, symbolizing the stories and memories cherished by an ethnic group, and even by all humanity. All these are embodied in this palace, which is the largest one in humanity.

Indeed, when we told the stories to you, who are still a little child, we have come to a point when we understand little about the palace which used to be home of tens of thousands of people. According to a statistics in 2009, as many as tens of thousands of people visited it on a single day. Such record is greater than that of a theme park. For an imperial palace, this number is incredible.

We, or at least most of us, will never be emperors, empresses, princes or ministers. It may even be impossible for us to imagine what it is like living in the palace where no electronic communications, information or entertainments. Nevertheless, we believe that in any ages, no matter who you are, you would encounter happy times and unhappy ones, and you would have the desire to love and be loved. Such longings would pass on through generations to us, and to all of you little boys and girls, even they may take on different forms and shapes.

Would the future you, in your own future ways, bring these longings to your own children's world?

Best Wishes!

Chiu Kwong Chiu
Design And Cultural Studies Workshop