title: Antilia (building)

text: The building plan was approved by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation in 2003, and construction started in 2006 with Leighton Asia initially taking charge, and completed by B. E. Billimoria & Company Ltd. The architects altered floor plans and design concepts as the construction of the building progressed. The home has 27 floors with extra-high ceilings. (Other buildings of equivalent height may have as many as 60 floors.) The home was also designed to survive an earthquake of magnitude 8. It is considered by some to be the tallest single-family house in the world, but others disqualify the Antilia because it includes space for a staff of 600.


title: Antilia (building)

text: The interior design uses the shapes of the lotus and the sun. These two features are repeated throughout the building using crystals, marble, and mother-of-pearl. However, no two floors use the same materials or plan, the idea of the design is of consistency, but no repetition.


title: Antilia (building)

text: The building has one helipad, however, it is not operational. The helipads have to be certified air-worthy by the Director-General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), and have yet to get approval from the central defence and environment ministries.


title: Antilia (building)

text: The house warming was done in November 2010, but Ambani did not immediately move in for fear of "bad luck". In June 2011, almost 50 renowned pandits were invited to conduct pujas and address vastu issues in the building, after which the Ambanis took up residence in September 2011.


title: Antilia (building)

text: Prior to construction, the worth of the plot and unbuilt house were estimated to be more than US$1.2 billion. During planning, the house was expected to be the world's largest and most expensive home, with a cost of about US$2 billion.


title: Antilia (building)

text: On 10 July 2017, a fire broke out on the ninth floor, and it was extinguished within a few minutes. Six fire tenders reached the building within 10 minutes of getting the call. However, the fire was extinguished by Antilia staff before the fire brigade team arrived, using a small line of fixed firefighting systems and fire extinguishers. The fire was confined to the 4G antenna and plastic framing of the vertical garden.


title: Antilia (building)

text: On February 25, 2021, a car containing 20 explosive gelatin sticks and a threatening letter targeting the Ambanis, was found near Antilia. The car was parked about 400 metres from the building on Carmichael Road bordering Altamount Road. A security officer at Antilia placed a call to the police control room regarding the suspicious vehicle, and the police rushed to the spot, joined by the bomb detection and disposal squad. After the sniffer dogs detected explosives, the bomb squad removed the gelatin sticks, which were found to be not assembled, and had no battery or detonator. The probe was led by the Mumbai's crime intelligence unit head Sachin Vaze. The case was handed to the National Investigative Agency, which found out that Vaze was himself involved in this incident, and he was arrested.


title: Antilia (building)

text: Tata Group former chairman Ratan Tata said Antilia is an example of rich Indians' lack of empathy for the poor. Tata said, "The person who lives in there should be concerned about what he sees around him and asking how he can make a difference. If he cannot, then it's sad because this country needs people to allocate some of their enormous wealth to finding ways of mitigating the hardship that people have. It makes me wonder why someone would do that. That's what revolutions are made of."


title: Mischa Barton

text: Mischa Anne Marsden Barton (born 24 January 1986) is a British-American film, television, and stage actress. She began her career on the stage, appearing in Tony Kushner's "Slavs!" and took the lead in James Lapine's "Twelve Dreams" at New York City's Lincoln Center. She made her screen debut with a guest appearance on the American soap opera "All My Children" (1996), and voicing a character on the Nickelodeon cartoon series "KaBlam!" (1996–97). Her first major film role was as the protagonist of "Lawn Dogs" (1997), a drama co-starring Sam Rockwell. She appeared in major pictures such as the romantic comedy "Notting Hill" (1999) and M. Night Shyamalan's psychological thriller "The Sixth Sense" (1999). She also starred in the indie crime drama "Pups" (1999).


title: Mischa Barton

text: Barton later appeared in the independent drama "Lost and Delirious" (2001) and guest-starred as Evan Rachel Wood's girlfriend on ABC's "Once and Again" (2001–02). She played Marissa Cooper in the Fox television series "The O.C." (2003–2006), for which she received two Teen Choice Awards. The role brought Barton into mainstream fame, and "Entertainment Weekly" named her the "It Girl" of 2003.


title: Mischa Barton

text: Barton has since appeared in the comedy remake "St Trinian's" (2007), the Richard Attenborough–directed drama "Closing the Ring" (2007) and "Assassination of a High School President" (2008). She returned to television, starring in the short-lived Ashton Kutcher-produced CW series "The Beautiful Life" (2009).


title: Mischa Barton

text: In 2012, she returned to the stage, performing in the Irish production of "Steel Magnolias". She also appeared alongside Martin Sheen in "" (2014). She has garnered critical praise for her roles in independent films, with the "Los Angeles Times" praising her "standout" performance in "Starcrossed" (2014). Barton was cast in the first season of the MTV series "" (2019–2021), a reboot of "The Hills".


title: Mischa Barton

text: Barton was born at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in Hammersmith, London, to an Irish mother, Nuala Quinn-Barton, a producer, and an English father, Paul Marsden Barton, a foreign exchange broker from Manchester.


title: Mischa Barton

text: Her maternal grandfather was an Irish language professor at Queen's University Belfast. She has two sisters, Hania (younger) and Zoe (older), the latter a barrister in London. Barton has stated that she briefly attended St. Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, but her father's work took the family to New York City when Barton was five years old. In 2006, she became a naturalised citizen of the United States, but retained her British citizenship. She is also eligible for Irish citizenship based through her mother.


title: Mischa Barton

text: Barton graduated from the Professional Children's School in Manhattan in 2004, and took a summer short course called Acting Shakespeare at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, in June and July 2006, at Sir Richard Attenborough's urging, after he directed her in "Closing the Ring".


title: Mischa Barton

text: Barton began acting at the age of eight, co-starring in the Off-Broadway premiere of the 1994 play, "Slavs!", written by Tony Kushner. Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" praised Barton's "so fine" and "chillingly authoritative" performance. "New York" magazine also praised her as "a darling little girl, [that] exhibits consummate charm". She appeared in several other Off-Broadway productions, taking a lead role in James Lapine's "Twelve Dreams" alongside Marisa Tomei at Lincoln Center. Canby again praised Barton, noting that she "has a sweet gravity as the doomed Emma". In 1996 Barton had a supporting role in Catherine Butterfield's "Where the Truth Lies" which opened at New York's Irish Repertory Theatre. "The New York Times" also remarked that "the winning child actresses Brittany Boyd and Mischa Barton are already smart enough not to overplay the naivete and precocity of their respective characters." In 1997, she appeared alongside Dianne Wiest at The Public Theater in Naomi Wallace's "One Flea Spare". The New York production went on to win the Obie Award for Best Play.


title: Mischa Barton

text: She made her film debut in "Lawn Dogs", which won awards at film festivals around the world. Barton won critical favour for her role, with Janet Maslin of "The New York Times" praising her "poised" performance and "Empire" celebrating her "hypnotic central performance". Barton then appeared in "Notting Hill" (1999) and "The Sixth Sense" (1999). Both films were critically and commercially successful, respectively earning $363,889,700 and $672,806,292. She also starred in "Pups", a ""Dog Day Afternoon" for the MTV generation", alongside Burt Reynolds; along with her co-star Cameron Van Hoy, film critic Roger Ebert called their work in the film "two of the most natural and freed performances I have seen by actors of any age."


title: Mischa Barton

text: Barton first appeared on television in 1994, playing a young Corvina Lang in flashbacks in the soap opera "All My Children". In 1996, she returned to the show, replacing Michelle Trachtenberg in the role of Lily Benton Montgomery. She guest-starred in eight episodes of the television series "Once and Again" as Jessie Sammler's (Evan Rachel Wood) girlfriend, Katie Singer. In 2001, she returned to film and starred in the independent Canadian drama, "Lost and Delirious", based on the novel "The Wives of Bath" by Susan Swan. The film was met with mixed reviews, but the performances of Barton and her co-stars Piper Perabo and Jessica Paré were widely praised. She also starred in "Julie Johnson" (2001) alongside Lili Taylor and Courtney Love, playing the daughter of a woman in a lesbian relationship. Barton also had a supporting role in the independent teen drama "Tart" (2001) with Brad Renfro and Dominique Swain.


title: Mischa Barton

text: Other television appearances include an episode of the Fox series "Fastlane" (2003). She also appears as the love interest in James Blunt's music video "Goodbye My Lover" (2005) and in Enrique Iglesias' music video "Addicted" (2003).


title: Mischa Barton

text: In August 2003, Fox premiered the television series "The O.C.", about affluent teenagers with stormy personal lives who reside in scenic Orange County, California. The show became an overnight success due to its large fanbase, and resulted in Barton's fame being increased through her role as Marissa Cooper. Barton departed from the show in the third-season finale in May 2006. During her time on the show, Barton garnered several Teen Choice Awards. She was also celebrated by "Glamour" as the "Next Big Thing". "The O.C." dropped in ratings dramatically during its third and fourth seasons, and ended in early 2007.


title: Mischa Barton

text: In July 2006, Barton appeared on the British comedy variety show "The Friday Night Project" as a guest host. In 2007, Barton appeared in the films "The Oh in Ohio" and the comedy film "Virgin Territory" with Hayden Christensen. She also joined Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer in Richard Attenborough's war drama "Closing the Ring". Attenborough praised her, saying "her ability to convey pain and sadness, hopefulness and fear, is riveting". "The Independent" also noted that "she lends her character a beguiling vulnerability." She also appeared in the British comedy "St Trinians" (2007), appearing as a former head girl of that school advising current senior pupils on fashion and style. Later in 2007, Barton was cast in the international film produced by the Russian band t.A.T.u., called "You and I". The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2008 and was released theatrically in Russia in 2011.


title: Mischa Barton

text: She appeared in "Assassination of a High School President" (2008), co-starring Bruce Willis, which premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. "The Hollywood Reporter" praised Barton's "captivating" performance. She also starred in the horror film "Walled In", which was released straight-to-DVD in March 2009. It received mixed reviews, but her performance was praised, with IGN calling her performance "terrific". Her next horror project, "Homecoming", received a limited release in July 2009. Barton did not attend the premiere of the psychological thriller due to a medical issue. She also starred in the 2009 film "Don't Fade Away". In early 2009 she began filming alongside Martin Sheen in "" a biopic of the Bhopal gas tragedy.


title: Mischa Barton

text: In a December 2007 interview, she indicated she would return to television for the right project; "It's not that I dislike doing television at all. It would be interesting having more creative control over where the storylines go or the characters. But for the right thing, of course." In 2009 she starred as one of the main characters on "The Beautiful Life" a new series on The CW. The series was subsequently cancelled on 25 September 2009 after broadcasting two episodes. In December 2009, the technology company HP became the show's sponsor, airing the show's five episodes on YouTube. She guest starred on "", played an endangered prostitute in an episode that aired on 3 March 2010. She has since mainly filmed horror and thriller projects, taking roles in "The Sibling", "Cyberstalker", a Lifetime television film and "Apartment 1303 3D", the English-language remake of the Japanese horror film, "Apartment 1303". Barton also appeared alongside Ryan Eggold in Mark Edwin Robinson's supernatural romance thriller, "Into the Dark".


title: Mischa Barton

text: In May 2012, Barton discussed her recent preference for the horror genre, following roles in "Homecoming", "Apartment 1303" and "Sibling" "I literally became obsessed with that genre. I can't tell you. Because I never watched it when I was younger; it used to be way too terrifying for me." However Barton added that, "I think I've gone through my little phase, for the moment." In June, Barton appeared in Noel Gallagher's music video for "Everybody's on the Run". In July 2012, Barton made her stage return in an Irish production of "Steel Magnolias", playing Shelby. It premiered at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin on 12 September, and a nationwide tour followed thereafter. After the premiere, Barton received praise for her performance. The "Evening Herald" wrote "Barton sparkles from the moment she steps on stage...Barton's Shelby is instantly magnetic".


title: Mischa Barton

text: On 8 March 2016, Barton competed on the 22nd season of "Dancing with the Stars". She paired with professional dancer Artem Chigvintsev. On 4 April 2016, Barton and Chigvintsev were eliminated from the competition and finished in eleventh place. Later in 2016 Barton received praise for her role in the independent drama "Starcrossed". Writing in the "Los Angeles Times", Katie Walsh described how "Barton is a standout as the alluring, broken young woman who hides as much as she reveals." Barton was later critically recognized for her performance in "Deserted", a psychological survival story written and directed by Ashley Avis. Barton plays Jae, a young woman recently released from prison who goes on a soul-searching journey into the desert with her brother Robin, played by Jackson Davis. "Barton is well-cast, grounded and burdened," and "...delivers one of her best performances in years." In 2018, Barton was cast in "The Cat and the Moon", the directorial debut of Alex Wolff.


title: Mischa Barton

text: At the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards, MTV announced a reboot of "The Hills" entitled "", slated to premiere in 2019. Barton was announced as part of the cast of the new series. She did not return for the second season. Barton had a cameo appearance in "Spree", which starred Joe Keery of "Stranger Things" and premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. In October 2021, Barton was tapped to play an aspiring detective Miranda Green in the crime thriller film "Invitation To A Murder", directed by Stephen Shimek.


title: Mischa Barton

text: Barton has been in many television commercials and print advertising campaigns. Barton has modeled for companies Calvin Klein, bebe stores, Aéropostale, Monsoon Accessorize, Dooney & Bourke, JC (Jeans and Clothes), European clothing line Morgan de Toi, Jaspal, and Neutrogena skincare products. She became the spokesperson for Keds Sneakers, substantially increasing their sales. In Australia, she appears in commercials for teen magazine "Famous" and was the guest of honour at retail giant David Jones Tahitian Summer Collection launch. She has also endorsed Chanel jewelry, appearing at events for the brand. In a 2005 interview, she stated that she liked the Chanel brand because they produced a large number of clip-on earrings suitable for women who did not have pierced ears, as she did not at the time. In 2009, having had her ears pierced for her role in "The Beautiful Life", she modeled jewelry for the company Inspired Creations, including pierced earrings and their Waxing Poetic range of charms.


title: Mischa Barton

text: In 2008, she won the "InStyle" "icon of the year" award from Karl Lagerfeld at the Viper awards in Berlin.


title: Mischa Barton

text: Barton also became a spokesperson for the SAFE (Skin Awareness for Everyone) campaign in 2007. In addition, she lent her name to the TRAID campaign (Textile Recycling for Aid and International Development) in association with Visa Swap. Barton was photographed in April 2007 for the Fall 2007/2008 advertising campaign for Italian clothing brand Iceberg, modelling with Nicolas Bemberg.


title: Mischa Barton

text: In July 2008, she created a 14-piece handbag collection for online retailer ASOS.com. Barton was reportedly very involved in the line which retails from £20 to £145. She told ASOS magazine that she first discovered the website through her sister.


title: Mischa Barton

text: In December 2008, Barton premiered her line of headbands released on the Stacy Lapidus line. The headbands cost from $90 to $200. She also has a handbag line for London-based Ri2k, which is sold in the United Kingdom and Australia only. In early 2009, she became the "new face" of Herbal Essences.


title: Mischa Barton

text: In June 2010 she was announced as the face of Philipp Plein couture. Plein said, "Being in the limelight for a young and beautiful girl, the looks of course always get a lot of attention, Mischa Barton got a lot and learned to live with her fame. For me it was the big challenge to again show her as a Diva, a Rock 'n' Roll Goddess". The campaign will be circulated in international editions of leading fashion magazines.


title: Mischa Barton

text: In May 2011, Barton became the "exceptional godmother" of the Catalan designer Rosa Clará for her 2011 collection at Barcelona Bridal Week. Along with the Mexican singer Paulina Rubio, they became the stars of the show to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the signature of wedding dresses from Barcelona.


title: Mischa Barton

text: In October 2011, Barton appeared in a meat-themed photoshoot for Tyler Shields that was showcased at the Imitate Modern Gallery in London.


title: Mischa Barton

text: In 2012 Barton opened a short-lived clothes boutique in Spitafields, London, later revealing “Retail is not exactly a cakewalk, so just taking care of the store and dealing with production, quality and employees. Just the whole thing became overwhelming and beyond expensive.”


title: Mischa Barton

text: Barton purchased a home in Beverly Hills at age nineteen, and subsequently sold the home in 2016. She was previously in long-term relationships with the oil heir Brandon Davis, musician Cisco Adler, and the Australian model, James Abercrombie. In 2017, Barton won a revenge porn lawsuit against her former boyfriend, Jon Zacharias, stopping him from selling a sex tape of her.


title: Mischa Barton

text: In a guest essay published in 2021 by "Harper's Bazaar", Barton revealed that she felt that she had been "sexualised" in her earlier film roles, even becoming a "strange sex symbol" at 13 in Asia where her movie "Pups" garnered significant attention. She also revealed that she felt pressure to lose her virginity at age 18 when she joined the cast of "The OC" as her character was sexually active. Barton also revealed that persistent press attention and paparazzi intrusion led to her having PTSD.


title: Mischa Barton

text: In 2009, Barton served as the spokesperson for Climate Star, an organization that fights global warming through social and legislative activism. In 2007 she worked with the home shopping company QVC to raise funds for women's cancer research.


title: Mischa Barton

text: In 2006, Barton served as a spokesperson for the SAFE (Skin Awareness for Everyone) campaign and also lent her name to the TRAID campaign (Textile Recycling for Aid and International Development) in 2007, in association with Visa Swap. In 2007, Barton also served as an ambassador for Save the Children and the "One Water" campaign which brings water to remote locations in Africa, and was on the board of the Lupus Research Committee in Los Angeles.


title: Samuel Alito

text: Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. ( ; born April 1, 1950) is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President George W. Bush on October 31, 2005, and has served since January 31, 2006. He is the second Italian American justice to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court—after Antonin Scalia—and the eleventh Catholic.


title: Samuel Alito

text: Raised in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, and educated at Princeton University and Yale Law School, Alito served as the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey and a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) before joining the Supreme Court. He is the 110th justice.


title: Samuel Alito

text: In 2013, Alito was considered "one of the most conservative justices on the Court". He has described himself as a "practical originalist". Alito's majority opinions in landmark cases include "McDonald v. Chicago", "Burwell v. Hobby Lobby", "Murphy v. NCAA", "Janus v. AFSCME", and "Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization".


title: Samuel Alito

text: Alito was born in Trenton, New Jersey, the son of Samuel A. Alito Sr., an Italian immigrant, and Rose Fradusco, an Italian-American. His grandparents came from Roccella Ionica, Calabria and Palazzo San Gervasio, Basilicata, in southern Italy. Alito's father earned a master's degree at Rutgers University and was a high school teacher and later the first Director of the New Jersey Office of Legislative Services, a state government position he held from 1952 to 1984. Alito's mother was a schoolteacher. Both are deceased.


title: Samuel Alito

text: Alito grew up in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, a suburb of Trenton. He attended Steinert High School where he graduated in 1968 as the class valedictorian, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and "summa cum laude" from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1972, completing a senior thesis titled "An Introduction to the Italian Constitutional Court" under the supervision of Walter F. Murphy.


title: Samuel Alito

text: At Princeton, Alito chaired a student conference in 1971 called "The Boundaries of Privacy in American Society" which, among other things, supported curbs on domestic intelligence gathering and anticipated the need for a statute and a court to oversee national security surveillance. The conference report itself also called for the decriminalization of sodomy, and urged for an end to discrimination against gays in hiring by employers. "Though Alito's name is attached to the chair's report, it remains unclear to what extent the report represented his personal opinions. Alumni, who served as 'commissioners' for the junior conference Alito chaired, offered conflicting information on how best to interpret the report." Alito also led the American Whig-Cliosophic Society's Debate Panel during his time at Princeton. He avoided Princeton's eating clubs, joining Stevenson Hall instead.


title: Samuel Alito

text: While a sophomore at Princeton, Alito received a low lottery number, 32, in the Selective Service drawing on December 1, 1969. In 1970, he became a member of the school's Army ROTC program, attending a six-week basic training camp that year at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Alito was a member of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, which was formed in October 1972 at least in part to oppose Princeton's decisions regarding admitting women. Apart from Alito's written 1985 statement of membership in CAP on a job application, which he says was truthful, there is no other documentation of Alito's involvement with or contributions to the group. Alito has cited the banning and subsequent treatment of ROTC by the university as his reason for belonging to CAP.


title: Samuel Alito

text: Alito was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Army Reserve in 1972. He began his military duty after graduating from law school in 1975 and served on active duty from September to December while attending the Signal Officer Basic Course at Fort Gordon, Georgia. Alito was promoted to first lieutenant and captain, and completed his service obligation as a member of the inactive reserve before receiving his honorable discharge in 1980.


title: Samuel Alito

text: At Princeton, Alito was "almost alone" in his familiarity with the writings of John Marshall Harlan II and was much influenced by the course on constitutional interpretation taught by Walter F. Murphy, also his faculty adviser. During his senior year at Princeton, Alito moved out of New Jersey for the first time to study in Italy, where he wrote his thesis on the Italian legal system. Graduating in 1972, Alito left a sign of his lofty aspirations in his yearbook, which said that he hoped to "eventually warm a seat on the Supreme Court".


title: Samuel Alito

text: Alito then attended Yale Law School, where he served as an editor of the "Yale Law Journal" and earned a Juris Doctor in 1975.


title: Samuel Alito

text: After graduating from law school, Alito clerked for Third Circuit appeals judge Leonard I. Garth in Newark, New Jersey in 1976 and 1977. He interviewed with Supreme Court Justice Byron White for a clerkship but was not hired. Between 1977 and 1981, Alito was Assistant United States Attorney, District of New Jersey. There he served under chief of the appeals division Assistant U.S. Attorney, later federal circuit judge, Maryanne Trump Barry. (Barry and Alito later served alongside each other as judges on the Third Circuit.) While an Assistant U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, he prosecuted many cases involving drug trafficking and organized crime.


title: Samuel Alito

text: From 1981 to 1985, Alito was Assistant to U.S. Solicitor General Rex E. Lee. In that capacity he argued 12 cases before the Supreme Court for the federal government. In "Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists" (1986), the Supreme Court ruled against Charles Fried after he rejected a memo by Alito urging the Solicitor General to avoid directly attacking the constitutional right to an abortion. Alito lost only two of the cases he argued before the Supreme Court.


title: Samuel Alito

text: From 1985 to 1987, Alito was Deputy Assistant Attorney General under Charles J. Cooper in the Office of Legal Counsel during the tenure of Attorney General Edwin Meese. John F. Manning worked under Alito there. Between 1986 and 1987, Alito authored nearly 470 pages of memoranda, in which he argued for expanding his client's law enforcement and personnel authorities. In his 1985 application for Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Alito espoused conservative views, naming William F. Buckley, Jr., the "National Review", Alexander Bickel, and Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign as major influences. He also expressed concern about Warren Court decisions in the areas of criminal procedure, the Establishment Clause, and reapportionment.


title: Samuel Alito

text: From 1987 to 1990, Alito was the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey. When he arrived, the office had begun the prosecution of 20 defendants accused of being mob affiliates of Anthony Accetturo. In August 1988, the two-year trial, then the longest federal criminal trial in history, ended in the acquittal of all 20 after less than two days of jury deliberations. Alito soon hired Michael Chertoff as his chief deputy.


title: Samuel Alito

text: After an FBI agent was shot in the line of duty in 1988, Alito personally handled the trial, assigning himself the then-novice Stuart Rabner as an assistant, and securing the shooter's conviction. In March 1988, Alito sought a rehearing of extradition proceedings against two Indian men, represented by Ron Kuby, who were accused of being terrorist assassins, after Alito discovered that the death threats his prosecutor had received had been sent to her by herself. The prosecutor was later found not guilty of obstruction of justice by reason of insanity, after psychiatrists found she was a possible schizophrenic with up to four distinct personalities. In 1989, Alito prosecuted a member of the Japanese Red Army for planning a terrorist bombing in Manhattan.


title: Samuel Alito

text: As adjunct professor at Seton Hall University School of Law in Newark from 1999 to 2004, Alito taught courses in constitutional law and an original course on terrorism and civil liberties. In 1995, he was presented with the school's Saint Thomas More Medal "in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the field of law". On May 25, 2007, he delivered the commencement address at Seton Hall Law's commencement ceremony and received an honorary law degree from the school.


title: Samuel Alito

text: Alito is a member of the Federalist Society, a group of conservatives and libertarian lawyers and legal students interested in conservative legal theory.


title: Samuel Alito

text: As a visiting professor at Duke University School of Law, Alito taught Current Issues in Constitutional Interpretation in fall 2011 and a course in the Master of Laws in Judicial Studies program in summer 2012.


title: Samuel Alito

text: Third Circuit Judges Leonard I. Garth, for whom Alito clerked, and Maryanne Trump Barry, under whom Alito worked as an assistant U.S. Attorney, recommended Alito's judicial nomination to President George H. W. Bush. On February 20, 1990, Bush nominated Alito to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, to a seat vacated by John Joseph Gibbons. The American Bar Association rated Alito "Well Qualified" at the time of his nomination. He was confirmed by unanimous consent in the Senate on April 27, 1990, and received his commission three days later. As a Third Circuit judge, his chambers were in Newark, New Jersey.


title: Samuel Alito

text: On July 1, 2005, Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement from the Supreme Court effective upon the confirmation of a successor. President George W. Bush first nominated John Roberts to the vacancy, but when Chief Justice William Rehnquist died on September 3, Bush withdrew Roberts's nomination to fill O'Connor's seat and instead nominated Roberts to the Chief Justiceship. On October 3, Bush nominated Harriet Miers to replace O'Connor. Miers withdrew her acceptance of the nomination on October 27 after encountering widespread opposition.


title: Samuel Alito

text: On October 31, Bush announced that he was nominating Alito to O'Connor's seat, and he submitted the nomination to the Senate on November 10. Alito was unanimously rated "well qualified" to fill the Associate Justice post by the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Federal Judiciary, which measures the professional qualifications of a nominee. The committee rates judges as "not qualified", "qualified", or "well qualified". Leonard Leo was selected to play a role in shepherding Alito's appointment through the Senate.


title: Samuel Alito

text: Alito's confirmation hearing was held from January 9 to 13, 2006. Two active-duty members of the Third Circuit, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry and Chief Judge Anthony J. Scirica, testified in Alito's confirmation hearing, as did five senior and retired circuit judges. Alito responded to some 700 questions over 18 hours of testimony. He rejected the use of foreign legal materials in the Constitution, did not state a position on cameras in courtrooms (he had supported them while on the 3rd Circuit), said Congress could choose to outlaw LGBT employment discrimination in the United States if it wished, and told then-Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) that he endorsed a weak version of the unitary executive theory.


title: Samuel Alito

text: On January 24, his nomination was voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a 10–8 party line vote. Democratic Senators characterized Alito as a hard-right conservative in the mold of Clarence Thomas or Robert Bork. Alito professed reluctance to commit to any type of ideology, stating he would act as an impartial referee. He said he would look at abortion with an open mind but would not state how he would rule on "Roe v. Wade" if that decision were to be challenged. In 2022, Alito wrote the opinion in "Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization" that overturned "Roe v. Wade".


title: Samuel Alito

text: Democrats on the committee asked Alito about his past association with the conservative group Concerned Alumni of Princeton. Alito said that he had listed an affiliation with the group on his application to Ronald Reagan's Justice Department in order to establish his conservative credentials: He claimed "You have to look at the question that I was responding to and the form that I was filling out... I was applying for a position in the Reagan administration. And my answers were truthful statements, but what I was trying to outline were the things that were relevant to obtaining a political position." But during the confirmation hearings, Alito disavowed the group, whose views were criticized as racist and sexist, saying: "I disavow them. I deplore them. They represent things that I have always stood against and I can't express too strongly." During Alito's Senate confirmation hearings, his wife, Martha Ann Alito, broke into tears after Republicans expressed their disapproval of how some Democrats on the panel were characterizing Alito.


title: Samuel Alito

text: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) formally opposed the nomination of Alito. The ACLU has only taken this step three other times in its entire history, opposing the nominations of William Rehnquist, Robert Bork and Brett Kavanaugh. In releasing its report on Alito, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said, "At a time when our president has claimed unprecedented authority to spy on Americans and jail terrorism suspects indefinitely, America needs a Supreme Court justice who will uphold our precious civil liberties. Alito's record shows a willingness to support government actions that abridge individual freedoms."


title: Samuel Alito

text: Debate on the nomination began in the full Senate on January 25. After a failed filibuster attempt by Senator John Kerry, the Senate confirmed Alito to the Supreme Court on January 31 by a vote of 58–42, with four Democratic senators, Tim Johnson, Robert Byrd, Kent Conrad and Ben Nelson, voting for confirmation and one Republican, Lincoln Chafee, and an Independent, Jim Jeffords, voting against. Alito became the 110th justice, the second Italian-American, and the 11th Catholic in the history of the Supreme Court, and the fifth Catholic on the Court at the time he assumed office.


title: Samuel Alito

text: Because Alito joined the Court mid-term, he did not participate in the decisions of most of the early cases in the Court term because he had not heard arguments for them. These decisions were released with an 8-member Court; none were 4–4, so Alito would not have been the deciding vote in any of them if he had participated. Only three of these cases  – "Garcetti v. Ceballos", "Hudson v. Michigan", and "Kansas v. Marsh"  – were reargued since a tie needed to be broken.


title: Samuel Alito

text: Alito delivered his first written opinion on May 1, 2006, in "Holmes v. South Carolina", a case involving the right of criminal defendants to present evidence that a third party committed the crime. From the beginning of the Rehnquist Court to the nomination of Justice Elena Kagan, new justices have been given unanimous opinions to write as their first opinion, often done as a courtesy "breaking in" of new justices, so that every justice has at least one unanimous, uncontroversial opinion under their belt. Alito wrote for a unanimous court in ordering a new trial for Bobby Lee Holmes due to South Carolina's rule that barred such evidence based on the strength of the prosecution's case, rather than on the relevance and strength of the defense evidence itself. His other majority opinions in his first term were in "Zedner v. United States", "Woodford v. Ngo", and "Arlington Central School District Board of Education v. Murphy".


title: Samuel Alito

text: In his first term, Alito voted fairly conservatively. For example, in the three reargued cases ("Garcetti v. Ceballos", "Hudson v. Michigan" and "Kansas v. Marsh"), Alito created a 5–4 majority by voting with the four other conservative Justices – Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas. He further voted with the conservative wing of the court on "Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon" and "Rapanos v. United States". Alito also dissented in "Hamdan v. Rumsfeld", alongside Justices Scalia and Thomas.


title: Samuel Alito

text: In 2013, Alito was considered "one of the most conservative justices on the Court". But while his voting record is conservative, he does not always join the most conservative Justices on the Court. On February 1, 2006, in Alito's first decision on the Supreme Court, he voted with the majority (6–3) to refuse Missouri's request to vacate the stay of execution issued by the Eighth Circuit for death-row inmate Michael Taylor; Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia and Thomas were in favor of vacating the stay. Missouri had twice asked the justices to lift the stay and permit the execution.


title: Samuel Alito

text: Moreover, despite having been at one time nicknamed "Scalito", Alito's views have differed from those of Scalia (and Thomas), as in the Michael Taylor case cited above and various other cases of the 2005 term. A fierce critic of reliance on legislative history in statutory interpretation, Scalia was the only member of the Court in "Zedner v. United States" not to join a section of Alito's opinion that discussed the legislative history of the statute in question. In two higher-profile cases, involving the constitutionality of political gerrymandering and campaign finance reform ("LULAC v. Perry" and "Randall v. Sorrell"), Alito adopted narrow positions, declining to join the bolder positions advanced by either philosophical side of the Court. According to a SCOTUSblog analysis of 2005 term decisions, Alito and Scalia concurred in the result of 86% of decisions (in which both participated), and concurred in full in 75%.


title: Samuel Alito

text: Alito's majority opinion in the 2008 worker protection case "Gomez-Perez v. Potter" cleared the way for federal workers who experience retaliation after filing age discrimination complaints to sue for damages. He sided with the liberal bloc of the court, inferring protection against retaliation in the federal-sector provision of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act despite the lack of an explicit provision concerning retaliation.


title: Samuel Alito

text: In 2020, Alito wrote a dissent joined by Clarence Thomas to "Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia", arguing that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not prohibit discrimination by sexual orientation or gender identity and criticizing the majority's interpretation of Title VII. In October 2020, Alito agreed with the other justices to deny an appeal filed by Kim Davis, a county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, but joined Thomas in writing a separate opinion reiterating his dissent in "Obergefell v. Hodges" and expressing his belief that the ruling was wrongly decided.


title: Samuel Alito

text: On November 12, 2020, Alito made headlines for comments about the COVID-19 pandemic. Speaking to the Federalist Society, Alito criticized what he called the "loss of individual liberties", saying, "We have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive and prolonged as those experienced for most of 2020", and called the pandemic "a Constitutional stress test".


title: Samuel Alito

text: In 2003, Congress passed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which led to a lawsuit in the case of "Gonzales v. Carhart". The Court had previously ruled in "Stenberg v. Carhart" that a state's ban on partial birth abortion was unconstitutional because such a ban did not have an exception in the case of a threat to the health of the mother. The membership of the Court changed after "Stenberg", with Roberts and Alito replacing Rehnquist (a dissenter in "Roe") and O'Connor (a supporter of "Roe") respectively. Further, the ban at issue in "Gonzales v. Carhart" was a federal statute, rather than a state statute as in the "Stenberg" case.


title: Samuel Alito

text: On April 18, 2007, the Supreme Court handed down a decision ruling the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act constitutional. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the five-justice majority that Congress was within its power to generally ban the procedure, although the Court left open the door for as-applied challenges. Kennedy said that the challenged statute was consistent with the Court's prior decisions in "Roe v. Wade", "Planned Parenthood v. Casey", and "Stenberg v. Carhart".


title: Samuel Alito

text: Alito joined fully in the majority, as did Roberts. Thomas filed a concurring opinion, joined by Scalia, contending that the Court's prior decisions in "Roe v. Wade" and "Planned Parenthood v. Casey" should be reversed, and also noting that the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act may exceed the powers of Congress under the Commerce Clause. Alito, Roberts, and Kennedy did not join that assertion. Justices Ginsburg, Souter, Breyer, and Stevens dissented, contending that the ruling ignored Supreme Court abortion precedent.


title: Samuel Alito

text: On May 2, 2022, "Politico" published a leak of a first draft of a majority opinion by Alito that circulated among the justices in February 2022 for the upcoming decision in "Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization". The opinion would overturn "Roe v. Wade" and "Planned Parenthood v. Casey", and would likely either severely restrict access to abortion or make it completely illegal in states with trigger laws. On June 24, 2022, the ruling was handed down. It was mostly identical to the draft with the addition of replies to the dissenting and concurring opinions. Alito wrote that ""Roe" was egregiously wrong from the start." In July 2022, Alito gave his first public comments on the ruling in a keynote address for Notre Dame Law School's Religious Liberty Initiative in Rome. He mocked several foreign leaders for criticizing the decision, particularly U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose pending resignation Alito referenced, and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, who had compared the ruling to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Alito commented in October 2022 that the leaked opinion made some justices "targets for assassination".


title: Samuel Alito

text: In November 2022, as the investigation into who had leaked the draft opinion was still ongoing, it was revealed that Rob Schenck, an evangelical minister and former anti-abortion activist, had written Chief Justice Roberts a letter about an alleged previous leak of a Supreme Court decision. He wrote that he had been informed of the outcome of "Burwell v. Hobby Lobby" weeks before the June 2014 decision, authored by Alito and favorable to anti-abortion conservatives, was officially announced. Schenck claimed to have heard of the outcome from Gayle Wright, a conservative donor, shortly after she and her husband had lunch with Alito and his wife on June 3, 2014. The New York Times claims contemporaneous emails written by Schenck "strongly suggested he knew the outcome and the author of the Hobby Lobby decision before it was made public." In a statement, Alito denied having revealed the outcome or authorship of any decision before its official announcement, but did not dispute that the June 3 lunch with Wright had occurred.


title: Samuel Alito

text: Alito has also dissented from the Supreme Court's conservative justices on free speech cases, one of which, "Snyder v. Phelps", had to do with Westboro Baptist Church members' right to protest a military funeral. Alito offered the sole dissenting opinion, saying protesters "were sued under a very well-established tort that goes back to the 19th century, the intentional infliction of emotional, of severe emotional distress. And I thought that this tort constituted a reasonable exception to the First Amendment, but my colleagues disagreed about that."


title: Samuel Alito

text: In the 2007 landmark free speech case "Morse v. Frederick", Alito joined Roberts's majority decision that speech advocating drug use can be banned in public schools, but also warned that the ruling must be circumscribed so as not to interfere with political speech, such as discussion of the medical marijuana debate.


title: Samuel Alito

text: Since 1985, Alito has been married to Martha-Ann Alito, once a law librarian, who met Alito during his many trips to the library as a law clerk. They have two adult children together. Alito resided with his family in West Caldwell, New Jersey before his Supreme Court nomination. He has since moved to Alexandria, Virginia. Alito socialized with Judge Edward R. Becker and his classmate, Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter.


title: Samuel Alito

text: After graduating from Princeton, Alito was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Signal Corps and assigned to the United States Army Reserve. At Yale, he was a classmate of future dean Anthony T. Kronman and one year behind future Justice Clarence Thomas. After graduating from Yale Law School, Alito served on active duty from September to December 1975. The remainder of his time in the Army was served in the inactive Reserves. He was a captain when he received an honorable discharge in 1980. He is the only military veteran on the Court following Stephen Breyer's retirement in 2022.


title: Samuel Alito

text: In 2013, as part of the ongoing fallout from the Edward Snowden case, it was revealed by former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice that during 2002 and 2003 Alito's phones, as well as his staff and his family, were targeted for surveillance by the National Security Agency.


title: Samuel Alito

text: Alito is an avid baseball fan and a longtime fan of the Philadelphia Phillies. The Phillie Phanatic was a special guest at Alito's Supreme Court welcome dinner. He delivered the Supreme Court Historical Society's 2008 Annual Lecture "The Origin of the Baseball Antitrust Exemption", which was also published in two journals.


title: Sweet potato

text: The sweet potato or sweetpotato ("Ipomoea batatas") is a dicotyledonous plant that belongs to the bindweed or morning glory family, Convolvulaceae. Its large, starchy, sweet-tasting tuberous roots are used as a root vegetable. The young shoots and leaves are sometimes eaten as greens. Cultivars of the sweet potato have been bred to bear tubers with flesh and skin of various colors. Sweet potato is only distantly related to the common potato ("Solanum tuberosum"), both being in the order Solanales. Although darker sweet potatoes are often referred to as "yams" in parts of North America, the species is not a true yam, which are monocots in the order Dioscoreales.


title: Sweet potato

text: Sweet potato is native to the tropical regions of the Americas. Of the approximately 50 genera and more than 1,000 species of Convolvulaceae, "I. batatas" is the only crop plant of major importance—some others are used locally (e.g., "I. aquatica" "kangkong"), but many are poisonous. The genus "Ipomoea" that contains the sweet potato also includes several garden flowers called morning glories, though that term is not usually extended to "I. batatas". Some cultivars of "I. batatas" are grown as ornamental plants under the name "tuberous morning glory," and used in a horticultural context.


title: Sweet potato

text: The plant is a herbaceous perennial vine, bearing alternate triangle-shaped or palmately lobed leaves and medium-sized sympetalous flowers. The stems are usually crawling on the ground and form adventitious roots at the nodes. The leaves are screwed along the stems. The leaf stalk is 5 to 20 inches long. The leaf blades are very variable, long, the shape is heart-, kidney- to egg-shaped, rounded or triangular and spear-shaped, the edge can be entire, toothed or often three to seven times lobed, cut or divided. Most of the leaf surfaces are bare, rarely hairy, and the tip is rounded to pointed. The leaves are mostly green in color, but due to the accumulation of anthocyanins, especially along the leaf veins, they can be purple in color. Depending on the variety, the total length of a stem can be between 0.5 and 4 meters. Some cultivars also form shoots up to 16 meters in length. However, these do not form underground storage organs.


title: Sweet potato

text: The hermaphrodite, five-fold and short-stalked flowers are single or few in stalked, zymous inflorescences that arise from the leaf axils and stand upright. Some varieties rarely or never produce flowers. The small sepals are elongated and tapering to a point and spiky and (rarely only 7) 10 to 15 mm long, usually finely haired or ciliate. The inner three are a little longer. The 4 to 7 cm long, overgrown and funnel-shaped, folded crown, with a shorter hem, can be lavender to purple-lavender in color, the throat is usually darker in color, but white crowns can also appear. The enclosed stamens are of unequal length with glandular filaments. The two-chamber ovary is upper constant with a relatively short stylus. Seeds are only produced from cross-pollination.


title: Sweet potato

text: The flowers open before sunrise and stay open for a few hours. They close again in the morning and begin to wither. The edible tuberous root is long and tapered, with a smooth skin whose color ranges between yellow, orange, red, brown, purple, and beige. Its flesh ranges from beige through white, red, pink, violet, yellow, orange, and purple. Sweet potato cultivars with white or pale yellow flesh are less sweet and moist than those with red, pink or orange flesh.


title: Sweet potato

text: Although the soft, orange sweet potato is often called a "yam" in parts of North America, the sweet potato is very distinct from the botanical yam ("Dioscorea"), which has a cosmopolitan distribution, and belongs to the monocot family Dioscoreaceae. A different crop plant, the "oca" ("Oxalis tuberosa", a species of wood sorrel), is called a "yam" in many parts.


title: Sweet potato

text: Although the sweet potato is not closely related botanically to the common potato, they have a shared etymology. The first Europeans to taste sweet potatoes were members of Christopher Columbus's expedition in 1492. Later explorers found many cultivars under an assortment of local names, but the name which stayed was the indigenous Taino name of "batata". The Spanish combined this with the Quechua word for potato, "papa", to create the word "patata" for the common potato.


title: Sweet potato

text: Though the sweet potato is also called "batata" (') in Hebrew, this is not a direct loan of the Taino word. Rather, the Spanish "patata" was loaned into Arabic as "batata" ('), owing to the lack of a /p/ sound in Arabic, while the sweet potato was called "batata khilwa" ('); literally meaning "sweet potato"). The Arabic "batata" was loaned into Hebrew as designating the sweet potato only, as Hebrew had its own word for the common potato, ' ("tapuakh adama", literally meaning "earth apple"; compare french "pomme de terre").


title: Sweet potato

text: Some organizations and researchers advocate for the styling of the name as one word—"sweetpotato"—instead of two, to emphasize the plant's genetic uniqueness from both common potatoes and yams and to avoid confusion of it being classified as a type of common potato. In its current usage in American English, the styling of the name as two words is still preferred.


title: Sweet potato

text: In Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic, the sweet potato is called "batata". In Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Central America, and the Philippines, the sweet potato is known as "camote" (alternatively spelled "kamote" in the Philippines), derived from the Nahuatl word "camotli".


title: Sweet potato

text: In Peru and Bolivia, the general word in Quechua for the sweet potato is "apichu", but there are variants used such as "khumara", "kumar" (Ayacucho Quechua), and "kumara" (Bolivian Quechua), strikingly similar to the Polynesian name "kumara" and its regional Oceanic cognates ("kumala", "umala", " 'uala", etc.), which has led some scholars to suspect an instance of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact. This theory is also supported by genetic evidence.


title: Sweet potato

text: In Australia, about 90% of production is devoted to the orange cultivar 'Beauregard', which was originally developed by the Louisiana Agricultural Experiment Station in 1981.


title: Sweet potato

text: In New Zealand, the Māori varieties bore elongated tubers with white skin and a whitish flesh, which points to pre-European cross-Pacific travel. Known as "kūmara" (in the Māori language and New Zealand English), the most common cultivar now is the red 'Owairaka', but orange ('Beauregard'), gold, purple and other cultivars are also grown.


title: Sweet potato

text: The origin and domestication of sweet potato occurred in either Central or South America. In Central America, domesticated sweet potatoes were present at least 5,000 years ago, with the origin of "I. batatas" possibly between the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico and the mouth of the Orinoco River in Venezuela. The cultigen was most likely spread by local people to the Caribbean and South America by 2500 BCE.


title: Sweet potato

text: "Ipomoea trifida", diploid, is the closest wild relative of the sweet potato ("Ipomoea batatas"), which originated with an initial cross between a tetraploid and another diploid parent, followed by a second complete genome duplication event. The oldest radiocarbon dating remains of the sweet potato known today were discovered in caves from the Chilca Canyon, in the south central zone of Peru, and yield an age of 8080 ± 170 BC.


title: Sweet potato

text: The sweet potato was grown in Polynesia before Western exploration, generally spread by vine cuttings rather than by seeds. Sweet potato has been radiocarbon-dated in the Cook Islands to 1210–1400 CE. A common hypothesis is that a vine cutting was brought to central Polynesia by Polynesians who had traveled to South America and back, and spread from there across Polynesia to Easter Island, Hawaii and New Zealand. Genetic similarities have been found between Polynesian peoples and indigenous Americans including the Zenú, a people inhabiting the Pacific coast of present-day Colombia, indicating that Polynesians could have visited South America and taken sweet potatoes prior to European contact. Dutch linguists and specialists in Amerindian languages Willem Adelaar and Pieter Muysken have suggested that the word for sweet potato is shared by Polynesian languages and languages of South America: Proto-Polynesian * (compare Rapa Nui , Hawaiian , Māori ) may be connected with Quechua and Aymara ~ . Adelaar and Muysken assert that the similarity in the word for sweet potato is proof of either incidental contact or sporadic contact between the Central Andes and Polynesia.


title: Sweet potato

text: Some researchers, citing divergence time estimates, suggest that sweet potatoes might have been present in Polynesia thousands of years before humans arrived there. However, the present scholarly consensus favours the pre-Columbian contact model.


title: Sweet potato

text: Sweet potatoes were first introduced to the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period (1521-1898) via the Manila galleons, along with other New World crops. It was introduced to the Fujian province of China in about 1594 from Luzon, in response to a major crop failure. The growing of sweet potatoes was encouraged by the Governor Chin Hsüeh-tseng (Jin Xuezeng).


title: Sweet potato

text: Sweet potatoes were also introduced to the Ryukyu Kingdom, present-day Okinawa, Japan, in the early 1600s by the Portuguese. Sweet potatoes became a staple in Japan because they were important in preventing famine when rice harvests were poor. Aoki Konyō helped popularize the cultivation of the sweet potato in Japan, and the Tokugawa bakufu sponsored, published, and disseminated a vernacular Japanese translation of his research monograph on sweet potatoes to encourage their growth more broadly. Sweet potatoes were planted in Shōgun Tokugawa Yoshimune's private garden. It was first introduced to Korea in 1764. Kang P'il-ri and Yi Kwang-ryŏ embarked on a project to grow sweet potatoes in Seoul in 1766, using the knowledge of Japanese cultivators they learned in Tongnae starting in 1764. The project succeeded for a year but ultimately failed in winter 1767 after Kang's unexpected death.


title: Sweet potato

text: The sweet potato arrived in Europe with the Columbian exchange. It is recorded, for example, in "Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book", compiled in England in 1604.


title: Sweet potato

text: The genome of cultivated sweet potatoes contains sequences of DNA from "Agrobacterium" ("sensu lato"; specifically, one related to "Rhizobium rhizogenes"), with genes actively expressed by the plants. The T-DNA transgenes were not observed in closely related wild relatives of the sweet potato. Studies indicated that the sweet potato genome evolved over millennia, with eventual domestication of the crop taking advantage of natural genetic modifications. These observations make sweet potatoes the first known example of a naturally transgenic food crop.


title: Sweet potato

text: The plant does not tolerate frost. It grows best at an average temperature of , with abundant sunshine and warm nights. Annual rainfalls of are considered most suitable, with a minimum of in the growing season. The crop is sensitive to drought at the tuber initiation stage 50–60 days after planting, and it is not tolerant to water-logging, as it may cause tuber rots and reduce growth of storage roots if aeration is poor.


title: Sweet potato

text: Depending on the cultivar and conditions, tuberous roots mature in two to nine months. With care, early-maturing cultivars can be grown as an annual summer crop in temperate areas, such as the Eastern United States and China. Sweet potatoes rarely flower when the daylight is longer than 11 hours, as is normal outside of the tropics. They are mostly propagated by stem or root cuttings or by adventitious shoots called "slips" that grow out from the tuberous roots during storage. True seeds are used for breeding only.


title: Sweet potato

text: They grow well in many farming conditions and have few natural enemies; pesticides are rarely needed. Sweet potatoes are grown on a variety of soils, but well-drained, light- and medium-textured soils with a pH range of 4.5–7.0 are more favorable for the plant. They can be grown in poor soils with little fertilizer. However, sweet potatoes are very sensitive to aluminum toxicity and will die about six weeks after planting if lime is not applied at planting in this type of soil. Because they are sown by vine cuttings rather than seeds, sweet potatoes are relatively easy to plant. Because the rapidly growing vines shade out weeds, little weeding is needed. A commonly used herbicide to rid the soil of any unwelcome plants that may interfere with growth is DCPA, also known as Dacthal. In the tropics, the crop can be maintained in the ground and harvested as needed for market or home consumption. In temperate regions, sweet potatoes are most often grown on larger farms and are harvested before first frosts.


title: Sweet potato

text: Sweet potatoes are cultivated throughout tropical and warm temperate regions wherever there is sufficient water to support their growth. Sweet potatoes became common as a food crop in the islands of the Pacific Ocean, South India, Uganda and other African countries.


title: Sweet potato

text: A cultivar of the sweet potato called the "boniato" is grown in the Caribbean; its flesh is cream-colored, unlike the more common orange hue seen in other cultivars. "Boniatos" are not as sweet and moist as other sweet potatoes, but their consistency and delicate flavor are different than the common orange-colored sweet potato.


title: Sweet potato

text: Sweet potatoes have been a part of the diet in the United States for most of its history, especially in the Southeast. The average per capita consumption of sweet potatoes in the United States is only about per year, down from in 1920. "Orange sweet potatoes (the most common type encountered in the US) received higher appearance liking scores compared with yellow or purple cultivars." Purple and yellow sweet potatoes were not as well liked by consumers compared to orange sweet potatoes "possibly because of the familiarity of orange color that is associated with sweet potatoes."


title: Sweet potato

text: In the Southeastern United States, sweet potatoes are traditionally cured to improve storage, flavor, and nutrition, and to allow wounds on the periderm of the harvested root to heal. Proper curing requires drying the freshly dug roots on the ground for two to three hours, then storage at with 90 to 95% relative humidity from five to fourteen days. Cured sweet potatoes can keep for thirteen months when stored at with >90% relative humidity. Colder temperatures injure the roots.


title: Sweet potato

text: In 2020, global production of sweet potatoes was 89 million tonnes, led by China with 55% of the world total (table). Secondary producers were Malawi, Tanzania, and Nigeria.


title: Sweet potato

text: Cooked sweet potato (baked in skin) is 76% water, 21% carbohydrates, 2% protein, and contains negligible fat (table). In a 100 gram reference amount, baked sweet potato provides 90 calories, and rich contents (20% or more of the Daily Value, DV) of vitamin A (120% DV), vitamin C (24% DV), manganese (24% DV), and vitamin B6 (20% DV). It is a moderate source (10-19% DV) of some B vitamins and potassium.


title: Sweet potato

text: Sweet potato cultivars with dark orange flesh have more beta-carotene (converted to a higher vitamin A content once digested) than those with light-colored flesh, and their increased cultivation is being encouraged in Africa where vitamin A deficiency is a serious health problem. Sweet potato leaves are edible and can be prepared like spinach or turnip greens.


title: Sweet potato

text: The table below presents the relative performance of sweet potato (in column) to other staple foods on a dry weight basis to account for their different water contents. While sweet potato provides less edible energy and protein per unit weight than cereals, it has higher nutrient density than cereals.


title: Sweet potato

text: According to a study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, sweet potatoes are the most efficient staple food to grow in terms of farmland, yielding approximately / day.


title: Sweet potato

text: The starchy tuberous roots of the sweet potato are by far the most important product of the plant, although the leaves and shoots are also edible. In some tropical areas, they are a staple food crop. The tuber is often cooked before consumption as this increases its nutrition and digestibility, although the American colonists in the Southeast ate raw sweet potatoes as a staple food.


title: Sweet potato

text: The vines' tips and young leaves are edible as a green vegetable with a characteristic flavor. Older growths may be used as animal fodder.


title: Sweet potato

text: "Amukeke" (sun-dried slices of root) and "inginyo" (sun-dried crushed root) are a staple food for people in northeastern Uganda. "Amukeke" is mainly served for breakfast, eaten with peanut sauce. "Inginyo" is mixed with cassava flour and tamarind to make "atapa". People eat "atapa" with smoked fish cooked in peanut sauce or with dried cowpea leaves cooked in peanut sauce. "Emukaru" (earth-baked root) is eaten as a snack anytime and is mostly served with tea or with peanut sauce. Similar uses are also found in South Sudan.


title: Sweet potato

text: The young leaves and vine tips of sweet potato leaves are widely consumed as a vegetable in West African countries (Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, for example), as well as in northeastern Uganda, East Africa. According to FAO leaflet No. 13 - 1990, sweet potato leaves and shoots are a good source of vitamins A, C, and B (riboflavin), and according to research done by A. Khachatryan, are an excellent source of lutein.


title: Sweet potato

text: In Kenya, Rhoda Nungo of the home economics department of the Ministry of Agriculture has written a guide to using sweet potatoes in modern recipes. This includes uses both in the mashed form and as flour from the dried tubers to replace part of the wheat flour and sugar in baked products such as cakes, chapatis, mandazis, bread, buns and cookies. A nutritious juice drink is made from the orange-fleshed cultivars, and deep-fried snacks are also included.


title: Sweet potato

text: In Egypt, sweet potato tubers are known as "batata" (بطاطا) and are a common street food in winter, when street vendors with carts fitted with ovens sell them to people passing time by the Nile or the sea. The cultivars used are an orange-fleshed one as well as a white/cream-fleshed one. They are also baked at home as a snack or dessert, drenched with honey.


title: Sweet potato

text: In Ethiopia, the commonly found cultivars are black-skinned, cream-fleshed and called "bitatis" or "mitatis". They are cultivated in the eastern and southern lower highlands and harvested during the rainy season (June/July). In recent years, better yielding orange-fleshed cultivars were released for cultivation by Haramaya University as a less sugary sweet potato with higher vitamin A content. Sweet potatoes are widely eaten boiled as a favored snack.


title: Sweet potato

text: In East Asia, roasted sweet potatoes are popular street food. In China, sweet potatoes, typically yellow cultivars, are baked in a large iron drum and sold as street food during winter. In Korea, sweet potatoes, known as "goguma", are roasted in a drum can, baked in foil or on an open fire, typically during winter. In Japan, a dish similar to the Korean preparation is called "yaki-imo" (roasted sweet potato), which typically uses either the yellow-fleshed "Japanese sweet potato" or the purple-fleshed "Okinawan sweet potato", which is known as "beni-imo".


title: Sweet potato

text: Sweet potato soup, served during winter, consists of boiling sweet potato in water with rock sugar and ginger. In Fujian cuisine and Taiwanese cuisine, sweet potato is often cooked with rice to make congee. Steamed and dried sweet potato is a delicacy from Liancheng County. Sweet potato greens are a common side dish in Taiwanese cuisine, often boiled or sautéed and served with a garlic and soy sauce mixture, or simply salted before serving. They, as well as dishes featuring the sweet potato root, are commonly found at bento () restaurants. In northeastern Chinese cuisine, sweet potatoes are often cut into chunks and fried, before being drenched into a pan of boiling syrup.


title: Sweet potato

text: In some regions of India, sweet potato is roasted slowly over kitchen coals at night and eaten with some dressing, while the easier way in the south is simply boiling or pressure cooking before peeling, cubing and seasoning for a vegetable dish as part of the meal. In the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, it is known as "sakkara valli kilangu". It is boiled and consumed as evening snack. In some parts of India, fresh sweet potato is chipped, dried and then ground into flour; this is then mixed with wheat flour and baked into "chapattis" (bread). Between 15 and 20 percent of the sweet potato harvest is converted by some Indian communities into pickles and snack chips. A part of the tuber harvest is used in India as cattle fodder.


title: Sweet potato

text: In Pakistan, sweet potato is known as "shakarqandi" and is cooked as a vegetable dish and also with meat dishes (chicken, mutton or beef). The ash-roasted sweet potatoes are sold as a snack and street food in Pakistani bazaars especially during the winter months.


title: Sweet potato

text: In Sri Lanka, it is called "bathala", and tubers are used mainly for breakfast (boiled sweet potato is commonly served with sambal or grated coconut) or as a supplementary curry dish for rice.


title: Sweet potato

text: The tubers of this plant, known as "kattala" in Dhivehi, have been used in the traditional diet of the Maldives. The leaves were finely chopped and used in dishes such as "mas huni".


title: Sweet potato

text: In Japan, both sweet potatoes (called "") and true purple yams (called "daijo" or "beni-imo") are grown. Boiling, roasting and steaming are the most common cooking methods. Also, the use in vegetable tempura is common. "Daigaku-imo" () is a baked and caramel-syruped sweet potato dessert. Because it is sweet and starchy, it is used in "imo-kinton" and some other traditional sweets, such as "ofukuimo". What is commonly called "sweet potato" () in Japan is a cake made by baking mashed sweet potatoes.


title: Sweet potato

text: "Shōchū", a Japanese spirit normally made from the fermentation of rice, can also be made from sweet potato, in which case it is called "imo-jōchū". "Imo-gohan", sweet potato cooked with rice, is popular in Guangdong, Taiwan and Japan. It is also served in "nimono" or "nitsuke", boiled and typically flavored with soy sauce, "mirin" and "dashi".


title: Sweet potato

text: In Korean cuisine, sweet potato starch is used to produce "dangmyeon" (cellophane noodles). Sweet potatoes are also boiled, steamed, or roasted, and young stems are eaten as "namul". Pizza restaurants such as Pizza Hut and Domino's in Korea are using sweet potatoes as a popular topping. Sweet potatoes are also used in the distillation of a variety of Soju. A popular Korean side dish or snack, "goguma-mattang", also known as Korean candied sweet potato, is made by deep-frying sweet potatoes that were cut into big chunks and coating them with caramelized sugar.


title: Sweet potato

text: In Malaysia and Singapore, sweet potato is often cut into small cubes and cooked with taro and coconut milk ("santan") to make a sweet dessert called "bubur cha cha". A favorite way of cooking sweet potato is deep-frying slices of sweet potato in batter, served as a tea-time snack. In homes, sweet potatoes are usually boiled. The leaves of sweet potatoes are usually stir-fried with only garlic or with "sambal belacan" and dried shrimp by Malaysians.


title: Sweet potato

text: In the Philippines, sweet potatoes (locally known as "camote" or "kamote") are an important food crop in rural areas. They are often a staple among impoverished families in provinces, as they are easier to cultivate and cost less than rice. The tubers are boiled or baked in coals and may be dipped in sugar or syrup. Young leaves and shoots (locally known as "talbos ng kamote" or "camote" tops) are eaten fresh in salads with shrimp paste ("bagoong alamang") or fish sauce. They can be cooked in vinegar and soy sauce and served with fried fish (a dish known as "adobong talbos ng kamote"), or with recipes such as "sinigang". The stew obtained from boiling "camote" tops is purple-colored, and is often mixed with lemon as juice. Sweet potatoes are also sold as street food in suburban and rural areas. Fried sweet potatoes coated with caramelized sugar and served in skewers ("camote cue") or as French fries are popular afternoon snacks. Sweet potatoes are also used in a variant of "halo-halo" called "ginatan", where they are cooked in coconut milk and sugar and mixed with a variety of rootcrops, sago, jackfruit, and "bilu-bilo" (glutinous rice balls). Bread made from sweet potato flour is also gaining popularity. Sweet potato is relatively easy to propagate, and in rural areas can be seen abundantly at canals and dikes. The uncultivated plant is usually fed to pigs.


title: Sweet potato

text: In Indonesia, sweet potatoes are locally known as "ubi jalar" (lit: spreading tuber) or simply "ubi" and are frequently fried with batter and served as snacks with spicy condiments, along with other kinds of fritters such as fried bananas, tempeh, tahu, breadfruit, or cassava. In the mountainous regions of West Papua, sweet potatoes are the staple food among the natives there. Using the "bakar batu" method of cooking, rocks that have been burned in a nearby bonfire are thrown into a pit lined with leaves. Layers of sweet potatoes, an assortment of vegetables, and pork are piled on top of the rocks. The top of the pile then is insulated with more leaves, creating a pressure of heat and steam inside which cooks all food within the pile after several hours.


title: Sweet potato

text: In Vietnamese cuisine sweet potatoes are known as "khoai lang" and they are commonly cooked with a sweetener such as corn syrup, honey, sugar, or molasses.


title: Sweet potato

text: Young sweet potato leaves are also used as baby food, particularly in Southeast Asia and East Asia. Mashed sweet potato tubers are used similarly throughout the world.


title: Sweet potato

text: Candied sweet potatoes are a side dish consisting mainly of sweet potatoes prepared with brown sugar, marshmallows, maple syrup, molasses, orange juice, "marron glacé", or other sweet ingredients. It is often served in the US on Thanksgiving. Sweet potato casserole is a side dish of mashed sweet potatoes in a casserole dish, topped with a brown sugar and pecan topping.


title: Sweet potato

text: The sweet potato became a favorite food item of the French and Spanish settlers and thus continued a long history of cultivation in Louisiana. Sweet potatoes are recognized as the state vegetable of Alabama, Louisiana, and North Carolina. Sweet potato pie is also a traditional favorite dish in Southern U.S. cuisine. Another variation on the typical sweet potato pie is the Okinawan sweet potato haupia pie, which is made with purple sweet potatoes, believed to have been cultivated in Hawaii as early as 500 CE.


title: Sweet potato

text: The fried sweet potatoes tradition dates to the early nineteenth century in the United States. Sweet potato fries or chips are a common preparation, and are made by julienning and deep-frying sweet potatoes, in the fashion of French fried potatoes. Roasting sliced or chopped sweet potatoes lightly coated in animal or vegetable oil at high heat became common in the United States at the start of the 21st century, a dish called "sweet potato fries". Sweet potato mash is served as a side dish, often at Thanksgiving dinner or with barbecue.


title: Sweet potato

text: Māori grew several varieties of small, yellow-skinned, finger-sized kūmara (with names including , , , , and ) that they had brought with them from east Polynesia. Modern trials have shown that these smaller varieties were capable of producing well, but when American whalers, sealers and trading vessels introduced larger cultivars in the early 19th century, they quickly predominated.


title: Sweet potato

text: Prior to 2021, archaeologists believed that the sweet potato failed to flourish in New Zealand south of Christchurch due to the colder climate, forcing Māori in those latitudes to become (along with the Moriori of the Chatham Islands) the only Polynesian people who subsisted solely on hunting and gathering. However, a 2021 analysis of material excavated from a site near Dunedin, some further south, revealed that sweet potatoes were grown and stored there during the 15th century, before the industry was disrupted by factors speculated to be due to the Little Ice Age.


title: Sweet potato

text: Māori traditionally cooked kūmara in a hāngi (earth oven). This is still a common practice when there are large gatherings on marae.


title: Sweet potato

text: In 1947, black rot ("Ceratocystis fimbriata") appeared in kūmara around Auckland and increased in severity through the 1950s. A disease-free strain was developed by Joe and Fay Gock. They gave the strain to the nation, earning them the Bledisloe Cup in 2013.


title: Sweet potato

text: There are three main cultivars of kūmara sold in New Zealand: 'Owairaka Red' ("red"), 'Toka Toka Gold' ("gold"), and 'Beauregard' ("orange"). The country grows around 24,000 metric tons of kūmara annually, with nearly all of it (97%) grown in the Northland region. Kūmara are widely available throughout New Zealand year-round, where they are a popular alternative to potatoes.


title: Sweet potato

text: Kūmara are often included in roast meals, and served with sour cream and sweet chili sauce. They are served alongside such vegetables as potatoes and pumpkin and, as such, are generally prepared in a savory manner. They are ubiquitous in supermarkets, roast meal takeaway shops and hāngi.


title: Sweet potato

text: Among the Urapmin people of Papua New Guinea, taro (known in Urap as "ima") and the sweet potato (Urap: "wan") are the main sources of sustenance, and in fact the word for "food" in Urap is a compound of these two words.


title: Sweet potato

text: In Spain, sweet potato is called "boniato". On the evening of All Souls' Day, in Catalonia (northeastern Spain) it is traditional to serve roasted sweet potato and chestnuts, panellets and sweet wine. The occasion is called "La Castanyada". Sweet potato is also used to make cakes or to eat roasted through the whole country.


title: Sweet potato

text: In Peru, sweet potatoes are called "camote" and are frequently served alongside ceviche. Sweet potato chips are also a commonly sold snack, be it on the street or in packaged foods.


title: Sweet potato

text: Dulce de batata is a traditional Argentine, Paraguayan and Uruguayan dessert, which is made of sweet potatoes. It is a sweet jelly, which resembles a marmalade because of its color and sweetness but it has a harder texture, and it has to be sliced in thin portions with a knife as if it was a pie. It is commonly served with a portion of the same size of soft cheese on top of it.


title: Sweet potato

text: In the Veneto (northeast Italy), sweet potato is known as "patata mericana" in the Venetian language ("patata americana" in Italian, meaning "American potato"), and it is cultivated above all in the southern area of the region; it is a traditional fall dish, boiled or roasted.


title: Sweet potato

text: Globally, sweet potatoes are now a staple ingredient of modern sushi cuisine, specifically used in maki rolls. The advent of sweet potato as a sushi ingredient is credited to chef Bun Lai of Miya's Sushi, who first introduced sweet potato rolls in the 1990s as a plant-based alternative to traditional fish-based sushi rolls.


title: Sweet potato

text: Freezing a sweet potato until solid, baking at a low temperature, then baking at a high temperature, brings out the sweetness, with gradual heating, increasing the time spent at the temperature for enzymatic activity, and then high temperature caramelizes converted sugars.


title: Sweet potato

text: In South America, the juice of red sweet potatoes is combined with lime juice to make a dye for cloth. By varying the proportions of the juices, every shade from pink to black can be obtained. Purple sweet potato color is also used as a ‘natural’ food coloring.


title: Sweet potato

text: Cuttings of sweet potato vine, either edible or ornamental cultivars, will rapidly form roots in water and will grow in it, indefinitely, in good lighting with a steady supply of nutrients. For this reason, sweet potato vine is ideal for use in home aquariums, trailing out of the water with its roots submerged, as its rapid growth is fueled by toxic ammonia and nitrates, a waste product of aquatic life, which it removes from the water. This improves the living conditions for fish, which also find refuge in the extensive root systems.


title: Sweet potato

text: Ornamental sweet potatoes are popular landscape, container, and bedding plants. Grown as an annual in zones up to USDA hardiness Zone 9, they grow rapidly and spread quickly. Cultivars are available in many colors, such as green, yellow, and purple. Some ornamental varieties, like 'Blackie', flower more than others. These ornamental cultivars are not poisonous, and although the leaves are edible, the tubers do not have a good taste.


title: Forbidden City

text: The Forbidden City () is a palace complex in Dongcheng District, Beijing, China, at the center of the Imperial City of Beijing. It is surrounded by numerous opulent imperial gardens and temples including the Zhongshan Park, the sacrificial Imperial Ancestral Temple, the Beihai Park, and the Jingshan Park. It is officially administered by the Palace Museum.


title: Forbidden City

text: The Forbidden City was constructed from 1406 to 1420, and was the former Chinese imperial palace and winter residence of the Emperor of China from the Ming dynasty (since the Yongle Emperor) to the end of the Qing dynasty, between 1420 and 1924. The Forbidden City served as the home of Chinese emperors and their households and was the ceremonial and political center of the Chinese government for over 500 years. Since 1925, the Forbidden City has been under the charge of the Palace Museum, whose extensive collection of artwork and artifacts were built upon the imperial collections of the Ming and Qing dynasties. The Forbidden City was declared a World Heritage Site in 1987.


title: Forbidden City

text: The complex consists of 980 buildings, encompassing 8,886 rooms and covering /178 acres. The palace exemplifies the opulence of the residences of the Chinese emperor and the traditional Chinese palatial architecture, and has influenced cultural and architectural developments in East Asia and elsewhere. It is listed by UNESCO as the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures in the world. Since 2012, the Forbidden City has seen an average of 14 million visitors annually, and received more than 19 million visitors in 2019. In 2018, the Forbidden City's market value was estimated at 70 billion USD, making it both the world's most valuable palace and the most valuable piece of real estate anywhere in the world.


title: Forbidden City

text: Some sources describe it as the largest palace in the world still in existence, but other Chinese imperial residences far exceed it in size, namely the Zhongnanhai which lies just west of the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace in Haidian District, Beijing, and the Chengde Mountain Resort in Chengde, Hebei Province.


title: Forbidden City

text: The Forbidden City in Beijing is one of the largest and most well-preserved ancient wooden structures in the world. It was listed as the first batch of national key cultural relics in 1961.


title: Forbidden City

text: The common English name "Forbidden City" is a translation of the Chinese name "Zijin Cheng" (). The name "Zijin Cheng" first formally appeared in 1576. Another English name of similar origin is "Forbidden Palace".


title: Forbidden City

text: The name ""Zijin Cheng"" is a name with significance on many levels. "Zi", or "Purple", refers to the North Star, which in ancient China was called the "Ziwei" Star, and in traditional Chinese astrology was the heavenly abode of the Celestial Emperor. The surrounding celestial region, the Ziwei Enclosure (), was the realm of the Celestial Emperor and his family. The Forbidden City, as the residence of the terrestrial emperor, was its earthly counterpart. "Jin" means "the place where the Celestial Emperor lives" not "forbidden". "Cheng" means a city.


title: Forbidden City

text: Today, the site is most commonly known in Chinese as "Gùgōng" (), which means the "Former Palace". The museum which is based in these buildings is known as the "Palace Museum" ().


title: Forbidden City

text: When Hongwu Emperor's son Zhu Di became the Yongle Emperor, he moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, and construction began in 1406 on what would become the Forbidden City.


title: Forbidden City

text: Construction lasted 14 years and required more than a million workers. Material used include whole logs of precious "Phoebe zhennan" wood () found in the jungles of south-western China, and large blocks of marble from quarries near Beijing. The floors of major halls were paved with "golden bricks" (), specially baked paving bricks from Suzhou.


title: Forbidden City

text: From 1420 to 1644, the Forbidden City was the seat of the Ming dynasty. In April 1644, it was captured by rebel forces led by Li Zicheng, who proclaimed himself emperor of the Shun dynasty. He soon fled before the combined armies of former Ming general Wu Sangui and Manchu forces, setting fire to parts of the Forbidden City in the process.


title: Forbidden City

text: By October, the Manchus had achieved supremacy in northern China, and a ceremony was held at the Forbidden City to proclaim the young Shunzhi Emperor as ruler of all China under the Qing dynasty.


title: Forbidden City

text: The Qing rulers changed the names on some of the principal buildings, to emphasise "Harmony" rather than "Supremacy", made the name plates bilingual (Chinese and Manchu), and introduced Shamanist elements to the palace.


title: Forbidden City

text: In 1860, during the Second Opium War, Anglo-French forces took control of the Forbidden City and occupied it until the end of the war. In 1900 Empress Dowager Cixi fled from the Forbidden City during the Boxer Rebellion, leaving it to be occupied by forces of the treaty powers until the following year.


title: Forbidden City

text: After being the home of 24 emperors – 14 of the Ming dynasty and 10 of the Qing dynasty – the Forbidden City ceased being the political centre of China in 1912 with the abdication of Puyi, the last Emperor of China. Under an agreement with the new Republic of China government, Puyi remained in the Inner Court, while the Outer Court was given over to public use, until he was evicted after a coup in 1924.


title: Forbidden City

text: In 1933, the Japanese invasion of China forced the evacuation of the national treasures in the Forbidden City.


title: Forbidden City

text: Part of the collection was returned at the end of World War II, but the other part was evacuated to Taiwan in 1948 under orders of Chiang Kai-shek, whose Kuomintang was losing the Chinese Civil War. This relatively small but high quality collection was kept in storage until 1965, when it again became public, as the core of the National Palace Museum in Taipei.


title: Forbidden City

text: After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, some damage was done to the Forbidden City as the country was swept up in revolutionary zeal. During the Cultural Revolution, however, further destruction was prevented when Premier Zhou Enlai sent an army battalion to guard the city.


title: Forbidden City

text: The Forbidden City was declared a World Heritage Site in 1987 by UNESCO as the "Imperial Palace of the Ming and Qing Dynasties",


title: Forbidden City

text: due to its significant place in the development of Chinese architecture and culture. It is currently administered by the Palace Museum, which is carrying out a sixteen-year restoration project to repair and restore all buildings in the Forbidden City to their pre-1912 state.


title: Forbidden City

text: The Shoukang Palace was also officially exhibited on August 15, 2013, after being displayed in its original state. And the sculpture museum located in the Cining Palace opened on May 31, 2015. And according to the 2015 scale, the Forbidden City will be 76% open by 2020. The Forbidden City is undergoing restoration of cultural relics and monuments, environmental improvement, and expansion of open areas for display and exhibition.


title: Forbidden City

text: On November 23, 2014, the Beijing Imperial Palace mascot debuted to the public, the mascot is derived from the traditional Chinese image of the auspicious dragon and phoenix, respectively, the dragon "strong" and phoenix "beautiful". 2015 October 11, the Palace Museum officially to the audience The opening of new areas such as the Cining Palace area, the Yanyin Building area, and the Donghua Gate, which increased the open area of the Palace from 52% to 65%.


title: Forbidden City

text: The Forbidden City is a rectangle, measuring from north to south and from east to west. It consists of 980 surviving buildings with 8,886 bays of rooms. The layout of the Forbidden City activated and protected the imperial code of ethics as a physical installation. The courtyard was built on a massive, luxurious scale but it has the appearance of an ordinary quadrangle courtyard. A common myth states that there are 9,999 rooms including antechambers, based on oral tradition, and it is not supported by survey evidence. The Forbidden City was designed to be the centre of the ancient, walled city of Beijing. It is enclosed in a larger, walled area called the Imperial City. The Imperial City is, in turn, enclosed by the Inner City; to its south lies the Outer City.


title: Forbidden City

text: The Forbidden City remains important in the civic scheme of Beijing. The central north–south axis remains the central axis of Beijing. This axis extends to the south through Tiananmen gate to Tiananmen Square, the ceremonial centre of the People's Republic of China, and on to Yongdingmen. To the north, it extends through Jingshan Hill to the Bell and Drum Towers. This axis is not exactly aligned north–south, but is tilted by slightly more than two degrees. Researchers now believe that the axis was designed in the Yuan dynasty to be aligned with Xanadu, the other capital of their empire.


title: Forbidden City

text: The Forbidden City is surrounded by a high city wall and a deep by wide moat. The walls are wide at the base, tapering to at the top. These walls served as both defensive walls and retaining walls for the palace. They were constructed with a rammed earth core, and surfaced with three layers of specially baked bricks on both sides, with the interstices filled with mortar.


title: Forbidden City

text: At the four corners of the wall sit towers (E) with intricate roofs boasting 72 ridges, reproducing the Pavilion of Prince Teng and the Yellow Crane Pavilion as they appeared in Song dynasty paintings. These towers are the most visible parts of the palace to commoners outside the walls, and much folklore is attached to them. According to one legend, artisans could not put a corner tower back together after it was dismantled for renovations in the early Qing dynasty, and it was only rebuilt after the intervention of carpenter-immortal Lu Ban.


title: Forbidden City

text: The wall is pierced by a gate on each side. At the southern end is the main Meridian Gate (A). To the north is the Gate of Divine Might (B), which faces Jingshan Park. The east and west gates are called the "East Glorious Gate" (D) and "West Glorious Gate" (C). All gates in the Forbidden City are decorated with a nine-by-nine array of golden door nails, except for the East Glorious Gate, which has only eight rows.


title: Forbidden City

text: The Meridian Gate has two protruding wings forming three sides of a square (Wumen, or Meridian Gate, Square) before it. The gate has five gateways. The central gateway is part of the Imperial Way, a stone flagged path that forms the central axis of the Forbidden City and the ancient city of Beijing itself, and leads all the way from the Gate of China in the south to Jingshan in the north. Only the Emperor may walk or ride on the Imperial Way, except for the Empress on the occasion of her wedding, and successful students after the Imperial Examination.


title: Forbidden City

text: Traditionally, the Forbidden City which is divided into two parts has the Outer Court () or Front Court () includes the southern sections, and was used for ceremonial purposes and the Inner Court () or Back Palace () includes the northern sections, and was the residence of the Emperor and his family, and was used for day-to-day affairs of state. (The approximate dividing line shown as red dash in the plan above.) Generally, the Forbidden City has three vertical axes. The most important buildings are situated on the central north–south axis.


title: Forbidden City

text: Entering from the Meridian Gate, one encounters a large square, pierced by the meandering Inner Golden Water River, which is crossed by five bridges. Beyond the square stands the Gate of Supreme Harmony (F). Behind that is the Hall of Supreme Harmony Square. A three-tiered white marble terrace rises from this square. Three halls stand on top of this terrace, the focus of the palace complex. From the south, these are the Hall of Supreme Harmony (), the Hall of Central Harmony (), and the Hall of Preserving Harmony ().


title: Forbidden City

text: The Hall of Supreme Harmony (G) is the largest, and rises some above the level of the surrounding square. It is the ceremonial centre of imperial power, and the largest surviving wooden structure in China. It is nine bays wide and five bays deep, the numbers 9 and 5 being symbolically connected to the majesty of the Emperor. Set into the ceiling at the centre of the hall is an intricate caisson decorated with a coiled dragon, from the mouth of which issues a chandelier-like set of metal balls, called the "Xuanyuan Mirror". In the Ming dynasty, the Emperor held court here to discuss affairs of state. During the Qing dynasty, as Emperors held court far more frequently, a less ceremonious location was used instead, and the Hall of Supreme Harmony was only used for ceremonial purposes, such as coronations, investitures, and imperial weddings.


title: Forbidden City

text: The Hall of Central Harmony is a smaller, square hall, used by the Emperor to prepare and rest before and during ceremonies. Behind it, the Hall of Preserving Harmony, was used for rehearsing ceremonies, and was also the site of the final stage of the Imperial examination. All three halls feature imperial thrones, the largest and most elaborate one being that in the Hall of Supreme Harmony.


title: Forbidden City

text: At the centre of the ramps leading up to the terraces from the northern and southern sides are ceremonial ramps, part of the Imperial Way, featuring elaborate and symbolic bas-relief carvings. The northern ramp, behind the Hall of Preserving Harmony, is carved from a single piece of stone long, wide, and thick. It weighs some 200 tonnes and is the largest such carving in China. The southern ramp, in front of the Hall of Supreme Harmony, is even longer, but is made from two stone slabs joined – the joint was ingeniously hidden using overlapping bas-relief carvings, and was only discovered when weathering widened the gap in the 20th century. The stone slabs were likely transported from a quarry via ice sledge along an ice path lubricated by well water en route.


title: Forbidden City

text: In the south west and south east of the Outer Court are the halls of Military Eminence (H) and Literary Glory (J). The former was used at various times for the Emperor to receive ministers and hold court, and later housed the Palace's own printing house. The latter was used for ceremonial lectures by highly regarded Confucian scholars, and later became the office of the Grand Secretariat. A copy of the "Siku Quanshu" was stored there. To the north-east are the Southern Three Places () (K), which was the residence of the Crown Prince.


title: Forbidden City

text: The Inner Court is separated from the Outer Court by an oblong courtyard lying orthogonal to the city's main axis. It was the home of the Emperor and his family. In the Qing dynasty, the Emperor lived and worked almost exclusively in the Inner Court, with the Outer Court used only for ceremonial purposes.


title: Forbidden City

text: Smaller than the Outer Court halls, the three halls of the Inner Court were the official residences of the Emperor and the Empress. The Emperor, representing Yang and the Heavens, would occupy the Palace of Heavenly Purity. The Empress, representing Yin and the Earth, would occupy the Palace of Earthly Tranquility. In between them was the Hall of Union, where the Yin and Yang mixed to produce harmony.


title: Forbidden City

text: The Palace of Heavenly Purity is a double-eaved building, and set on a single-level white marble platform. It is connected to the Gate of Heavenly Purity to its south by a raised walkway. In the Ming dynasty, it was the residence of the Emperor. However, beginning from the Yongzheng Emperor of the Qing dynasty, the Emperor lived instead at the smaller Hall of Mental Cultivation (N) to the west, out of respect to the memory of the Kangxi Emperor. The Palace of Heavenly Purity then became the Emperor's audience hall. A caisson is set into the roof, featuring a coiled dragon. Above the throne hangs a tablet reading "Justice and Honour" ().


title: Forbidden City

text: The Palace of Earthly Tranquility () is a double-eaved building, 9 bays wide and 3 bays deep. In the Ming dynasty, it was the residence of the Empress. In the Qing dynasty, large portions of the Palace were converted for Shamanist worship by the new Manchu rulers. From the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor, the Empress moved out of the Palace. However, two rooms in the Palace of Earthly Harmony were retained for use on the Emperor's wedding night.


title: Forbidden City

text: Between these two palaces is the Hall of Union, which is square in shape with a pyramidal roof. Stored here are the 25 Imperial Seals of the Qing dynasty, as well as other ceremonial items.


title: Forbidden City

text: Behind these three halls lies the Imperial Garden (M). Relatively small, and compact in design, the garden nevertheless contains several elaborate landscaping features. To the north of the garden is the Gate of Divine Might.


title: Forbidden City

text: Directly to the west is the Hall of Mental Cultivation (N). Originally a minor palace, this became the "de facto" residence and office of the Emperor starting from Yongzheng. In the last decades of the Qing dynasty, empresses dowager, including Cixi, held court from the eastern partition of the hall. Located around the Hall of Mental Cultivation are the offices of the Grand Council and other key government bodies.