Beijing's Imperial Palace: The Illustrated Guide to the Architecture, History, and Splendor of the Forbidden City

Browsing through this book it seems to have a lot of good info and a few maps of buildings. After looking through several books from the library on the Forbidden City, this one seems to be the most comprehensive. I like that they actually included a decent amount of pictures of buildings which others lacked. The main con as the other reviewer mentioned, is the pictures look like they where taken in the 80's or 90's and have a matte finish. I also took a star off because it's paperback, I think a hardcover with a larger page size would have been more appropriate.

This book is okay in terms of information. But it is weird looking. The paper is very cheap and the pictures look like Xerox copies. They are not glossy as one would expect. I don't know what's up with this book.