Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/50

 nor are we much impressed by the fact that it was possible to erect a flagstaff five yards high downstairs. But the most remarkable feature of the whole was the plan on which it was arranged. The various edifices were so disposed as to correspond with and otherwise represent that part of the heavens which lies between the North Star, the Milky Way, and the constellation Aquila, the vacant spaces being denoted by courts, corridors, and winding paths. This, it is said, was intended partly as an acknowledgment of the benign celestial influences to which the Emperor ascribed the brilliant success that had always attended him, and partly as a monument of the vastness of his dominions, which could only be symbolised by an imitation of the starry vault on high. Seven hundred thousand workmen who had suffered the punishment of castration were engaged in this enormous undertaking; stone was brought from the mountains to the north, and wood from the modern provinces of Ssŭ-chuan and Hunan, as far as that of Shansi. Nor was this enough for his ambition. Three hundred palaces were built in the city of Hsien-yang itself, and four hundred more outside, a ponderous monolith being erected on the shores of the Eastern Sea to serve as one entrance to the gigantic labyrinth. Seventy thousand families were told off to live in the palaces when ready, farmers and bonzes being the most numerous, all of whom were instructed to prosecute the duties of their respective callings with assiduity. As the time had not yet arrived for the Emperor to receive the rewards of his achievements in Heaven itself, he anticipated that epoch by transforming that part of Earth honoured by his more immediate presence into a terrestrial Heaven in miniature.