History
The Drum Tower was built in 1272 during the reign of Kublai Khan, at which time it stood at the very heart of the Yuan capital Dadu. At that time it was known as the Tower of Orderly Administration (Qizhenglou). In 1420, under the Ming Emperor Yongle, the building was reconstructed to the east of the original site and in 1800 under the Qing Emperor Jiaqing, large-scale renovations were carried out. In 1924, Feng Yuxiang removed the official status of the towers, replacing them with western time-keeping methods, and renamed the building "Mingchilou". Objects related to the Eight-Power Allied Forces’ invasion of Beijing and later the May 30 Massacre of 1925 were put on display, turning the towers as a museum. Nowadays, the upper story of the building serves as the People’s Cultural Hall of the East City District.
In the 1980s, after much repair, the Bell and Drum Towers were opened to tourists.
Read more about this topic: Gulou And Zhonglou (Beijing)
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“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The greatest horrors in the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers. The theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the passionless Robespierre. The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Cheka.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)