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Grandest palace remained a dream
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In addition to the Great Wall and the mausoleum featuring the life-sized Terracotta Warriors, China’s first emperor had actually planned to build a third world-class architectural wonder, namely, the Epang Palace, located about 15 kilometers to the west of Xi’an, the ancient Chinese capital in the northwest of the country.
It’s a pity that the dream project was never completed, and it now exists only in the rich imagination of people as the biggest and also the most grandiose and beautiful palace complex the world would have ever seen.
Soon after defeating the other six states and uniting the country in 221 BC, Qin Shi Huang (259-210 BC), the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC) and the unified country, planned to build a new imperial palace named after one of his favorite concubines, Epang, according to Sima Qian (circa 145-90 BC), the father of Chinese historiography and author of Shiji or “Historical Records.”
The emperor drafted more than 700,000 laborers, including a large number of prisoners, to build simultaneously the Epang Palace and his own mausoleum filled with life-sized warriors and horses made of terracotta. The construction of the palace officially began in 212 BC.
But the Epang Palace project had to be suspended more than a year later, after the First Emperor died during a tour in eastern China in 210 BC and construction workers were transferred to the site of the mausoleum to speed up the project there.
After completion of the mausoleum, the workers were ordered to return to the Epang Palace site by the succeeding emperor to continue the construction.
However, the project wasn’t close to completion when the Qin Dynasty collapsed.
According to a popular legend, even the buildings that were completed in the palace were burned down by Xiang Yu (232-202 BC), a noble turned rebel leader known for his matchless might and prowess.
Little evidence of fire
Xiang initiated his own rebellion against the Qin rule one year after the death of the First Emperor. It was said that when he invaded the ancient capital area, his troops set fire to the existing buildings of the Epang Palace and the fire raged for as long as three months until everything standing was reduced to ashes.
However, most modern archeologists have found little evidence at the site to support such a story. Instead, they have all discovered evidence suggesting the awesome size of the uncompleted palace complex.
According to findings by Chinese archeologists in the past few decades, the rammed earth foundation of the palace runs 1,320 meters east to west, 420 meters north to south and stands eight meters in height.
Historian Sima Qian claimed that the front hall in the palace alone encompassed floor space of 80,000 square meters, more than half of the total floor space in the existing Forbidden City in Beijing. It was big enough to seat more than 10,000 people, said Sima.
And in his “Ode to the Epang Palace,” Du Mu (AD 803-852), a leading Chinese poet of the late Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907), vividly described it as a virtual palace so tall, majestic and extravagant that it outshined “the sun and sky.”
However, Du pointed out that before such a palace took shape, all the trees on Shu Mountain (in today’s Sichuan Province in southwest China) had been cut down.
In 1961, the site of the Epang Palace was listed by the State Council, the Chinese Cabinet, as a Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the National Level.
In recent years, Xi’an, now capital of Shaanxi Province, has considered trying to rebuild part of Qin’s old dream palace to attract visitors. With an estimated total investment of 38 billion yuan (about US$6.21 billion), it simply would be too costly, and many fear that the palace rebuilding project could turn out to be another “lost grandeur” in the future.
Pictorial dictionary
阙 (què) watchtower, usually in pairs
Before the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) the pier-shaped watchtowers, called que in Chinese, were used exclusively in front of the imperial palace gates, serving as a symbol of stateliness as well as convenient lookouts.
Later, perhaps because of their relation to the imperial palace and their grandiose design and structure, stone carvings of paired que were employed to stand in front of ancestral temples, mausoleums and even the residences of nobles and government officials. However, there were strict hierarchical systems regarding the design, height and size of the stone gate piers.
During the Tang Dynasty and the Song Dynasty (960-1279), que evolved into part of complicated gate structures such as the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City in Beijing, which has a protruding que wing on each side of the gate.
In modern days, the gate piers have also been transformed into门墩 (mén dūn), or waist-high carved stone blocks commonly seen sitting on both sides of the front gates of residences such as the traditional Beijing courtyard dwellings.
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