Royal Palace Amsterdam

This guide to the Royal Palace Amsterdam centers on Louis Bonaparte, Emperor Napoleon's younger brother, installed as king of Holland in 1806. It follows his transformation of the seventeenth-century town hall — built on more than thirteen thousand wooden piles — into a palace filled with gilded Empire furniture shipped from Paris, and the growing rift with Napoleon over Dutch soldiers, ships, and smuggled trade. It touches on the 1807 gunpowder explosion in Leiden and the king the Dutch came to call Louis the Good.