This Building Housed the Imperial Telephone Bureau 皇家电话局
I basically walked along the central axis of the Forbidden Palace and I was already tired from all the walking. However, I only walked the central axis and I already saw a lot of things along the way. I decided to visit the other places within the palace complex which I haven’t been to yet, and believe me, there are still a lot of places to see here. One could spend a few days just stuying all these historical places. Although most of the places here are a couple of hundred years old, there are some places which are relatively new.
Before the Age of Mobile Phones, This was How it Worked
One of these places is the Imperial Telephone Bureau. This was built in the early 1900s, since the Qing emperors realized the importance of telecommunications in military and government affairs. As a result, this place housed the Imperial Telephone Bureau, which was China’s first telephone exchange. The first to benefit from this state of the art technology was naturally the emperor. There were six phones installed within the palace grounds. Since the technology was so new, I bet there weren’t really a lot of people he could call anyway. There is a photo of the telephone switchboard in operation, and it gives us a glimpse of the start of a high tech China.
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