History

The Yongle Emperor (reigned 1402–1424) was one of the most ambitious builders in Chinese history. In a single reign he relocated the imperial capital from Nanjing to Beijing, constructed the Forbidden City, launched the naval expeditions of Zheng He, and extended the Great Wall. His father, the Hongwu Emperor, founded the Ming Dynasty and was buried at the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum outside Nanjing. Yongle decided to honour this tomb with the largest commemorative stele ever built in China.

The commission was assigned to imperial workshops and quarrying began at Yangshan, a granite mountain approximately 25 kilometres from the mausoleum. The plan called for three sections: a decorative cap, a tall rectangular body bearing an imperial inscription, and a massive base in the form of a bixi — the traditional tortoise-shaped pedestal of Chinese commemorative architecture. Workers cut deep trenches around each block and roughed out the forms. The scale was unprecedented: the base alone, at roughly 13 metres tall and 30 metres wide, would have been the largest single quarried stone object in the world.

At some point the project was abandoned. The historical record is silent on the exact date or decision. Modern engineering analysis concludes that no method available in 1405 could move any of the three sections from the quarry to the mausoleum. The stele body alone, at an estimated 6,300 tonnes, is 75 times heavier than Stonehenge’s largest stone. The workers were stopped by physics. The quarry was later used for smaller objects during the Ming and Qing dynasties, but the three giant sections were left untouched. A public park was established in the 1990s.