Yangshan Stele Quarry

Three unfinished pieces of a stone tablet, still lying in the quarry where they were cut, and the clearest thing in Nanjing about the scale of Ming imperial ambition. The city records office gives the story: in 1405 the Yongle emperor gathered over ten thousand craftsmen at Yangshan, west of Tangshan, to cut the memorial stele for his father Zhu Yuanzhang's tomb; after several dozen months of work the base, the crown and the shaft had taken rough shape, and were abandoned because they could not be moved. Its figures: the base about 17 m high, 29.5 m wide, 12 m thick, about 16,250 tonnes; the crown about 10 m by 22 m by 10.3 m, about 6,118 tonnes; the shaft about 51 m by 14.2 m by 5 m, about 8,799 tonnes.