Once everyone had finished looking over the floor plan, Luo Chong brought out the separate plans for the other buildings—their detailed structural drawings, along with the draft perspective sketches he had drawn in pencil.
Moxin and the others were even more stunned after looking them over. The sheer grandeur of these buildings was utterly beyond anything they had dared imagine. In their minds, wasn't a house simply meant for people to live in? Why make it so big?
Looking again at the blueprints Luo Chong had provided, they saw that just the stretch from the palace gate to Hanyuan Hall, the main hall of the Front Court, was astonishing. One li in front of the palace gate stood an Artificial River, and above it were nine bridges of Chinese White Jade Marble, known as Dismounting Bridge. When officials came to court, they had to dismount here and walk.
Beyond Dismounting Bridge, along the stretch leading to Hanyuan Hall, stood towering Que Towers on either side, each more than ten meters high. Two enormous pavilions rose atop the Que Towers. The two Han-style watchtowers and Hanyuan Hall enclosed a square with sides a full li long.
The Hanyuan Hall at the front had actually been built atop a platform fifteen meters high. Never mind how well the hall itself had been constructed; just piling up that fifteen-meter platform on level ground would require an unfathomable amount of earthwork.
The group looked at several other main halls, as well as the side halls in the Rear Court. Most of the buildings of any significant size had to be built on raised platforms. Unless there happened to be a small mound or hill at the site, where would they get so much earth? If they dug it up somewhere a little farther away,