West Glorious Gate, Gatehouse at Forbidden City, China.

Xihua Men is the western gate of the Forbidden City, set in the west wall south of its midpoint and facing west toward the former imperial gardens at Zhongnanhai. Its red platform rests on a white marble base and holds three arched openings, square outside and round within. Above stands a hall with a double-eaved hip roof of yellow glazed tiles, five bays wide and three deep, ringed by marble balustrades and painted with ink-line spiral-and-gold patterns.

The gate was constructed in 1420 during the Ming Dynasty and functioned as a controlled access point to the imperial palace for centuries. It remained an important passage through multiple dynasties until the present day.

The gate's name plaque originally carried Manchu, Mongolian and Chinese inscriptions, later reduced to Manchu and Chinese, and after the 1911 Revolution only a bronze Chinese plaque remained. The gate faces the imperial Western Gardens, and Qing emperors and empresses passed through it on their way to the Western Hills. Its position offset toward the Meridian Gate aligned it with the outer-court axis of the Hall of Martial Valor and the Gate of Supreme Harmony.

The gate is guarded by Unit 8341 and is not open to the public, so it can only be viewed from outside. It faces west toward Zhongnanhai, and its west side is flanked by the long, shallow Screen Wall buildings added in 1975, whose west-facing windows are blind. Look for the bronze Chinese-only name plaque under the west eave.

The gate is guarded by Unit 8341 and closed to the public; from its tower one could once overlook the whole of Zhongnanhai. In 1973 Zhou Enlai came here in person to fix the length of the screen wall built beside it, making it nearly four times longer than planned so that the new Beijing Hotel wing could not see into the central leadership compound.