Zijincheng, also known as the Forbidden City, is the largest and best-preserved ancient palace-type wooden building in China, built without using a single nail. Since it was built in 1420, it has served as a palace where the emperor lives and works. Almost 600 years old, it has gone through two dynasties (i.e., the Ming and Qing dynasties (AD 1368–AD 1912)) and 24 emperors. It has survived more than 200 devastating earthquakes throughout its history, and it is still standing strong. In this paper, the authors introduce the construction technology of the ancient Chinese wooden structure as well as the greatest secret of the well seismic performance of the Forbidden City. The study found that the secret to the Forbidden City’s ability to withstand many powerful earthquakes lies in the flexibility of its timber structure, which is mainly reflected in the application of the tenon-mortise joints, energy-dissipation capacity of Dougong brackets and shallow-buried columns. The seismic responses of a 1:5 reduced-scale model of Shoukang Palace of the Forbidden City under different earthquake magnitudes are studied through a series of shaking table tests.

Workplace accidents are of great concern in the construction industry. Most of those accidents are caused by unsafe behavior in the workplace. Many previous studies have analyzed the causes of workers’ unsafe behaviors, but few have investigated workers’ feelings of insecurity from the perspective of systematic psychological theory. This study developed an attitude–behavior–intervention feedback loop mechanism of construction workers and used the dual-attitude theory to explain the occurrence mechanisms of unsafe behavior. Using this mechanism, an active-intervention system-dynamics model and a passive-intervention system-dynamics model were designed and simulated. The coefficient of the system dynamics equation in the simulation model involved meta-analysis to combine the correlation coefficients of existing studies, which increased the sample size and improved the statistical test efficiency. The results show that an implicit safety attitude has a more significant impact on safety behavior, and the effect of an active intervention is stronger than that of a passive intervention. Based on these results, this paper presents some feasible suggestions to reduce the probability of unsafe worker behaviors occurring.