Monuments of Scale
I’m standing amidst a turbulent sea of humanity - 60,000 people shuffling forward in a hot, sticky procession. Faces glistening with sweat, phone cameras raised like flags, the air thick with sunscreen and anticipation. We are all here, marching willingly toward a place built by hands now long turned to dust.
The Forbidden City, where tourists flood in by the tens of thousands each day. I’m struck not just by the sheer number of visitors, but by the realisation that today’s crowd pales in comparison to the vast legions that constructed these walls. As crowded as it feels, this isn't even a fraction of the human tide that once surged here.
The brilliance of Chinese historic wonders is their scale. The Great Wall, the Great Canal, the Terracotta Soldiers, and even the wells of Urumqi share in this glory.
One billion bricks stacked painstakingly, each handled by calloused, nameless hands. Each canal and moat dug by hand, mountains moved on the backs of humanity. Labourers by the hundreds of thousands, possibly even more - who lived, worked, and often died to fulfil an emperor’s grand vision.
Here’s the thing: In Europe, grandeur generally comes gilded in gold leaf and masterworks by Da Vinci or Michelangelo. The Vatican and Versailles, treasures of unimaginable wealth and exquisite artistry, but small, cute, and easily fit into an Instagram post. China’s richness is of another kind altogether - of an unimaginable scale of physical grandeur carved not from marble, but from flesh, bone, and sacrifice.
Take the Terracotta Army, a sprawling subterranean town built to guard Emperor Qin Shi Huang in the afterlife. It’s an endless sight - over 8,000 life-sized warriors standing eternally vigilant, every face unique, each sculpted with obsessive precision. An army of 700,000 men laboured tirelessly for decades, and when their work was complete, legend has it that they were buried alive within its confines with their emperor for eternity. And today we’re yet to even begin excavations of the main tomb complex to unveil its wealth.
The Great Wall, snaking over mountains, deserts, and valleys like a stone dragon. At least twenty thousand kilometres in length, walking even a tiny section of it is enough to impress and exhaust anyone in the summer heat. Yet how can we ever truly grasp the lives spent constructing it? Millions toiled here, conscripts driven by relentless supervisors, their lives as disposable as the stones they carried.
The emperors who decreed these astonishing projects had no cranes or bulldozers - just a decision made and justified by absolute power and authority. “Build that wall”, “Dig that canal”, “Move that mountain”, and countless lives were instantly mobilised toward monumental achievement or, perhaps more honestly, monumental waste.
In today’s world, we marvel at mega-projects, skyscrapers piercing the clouds in the Middle East, dams altering entire ecosystems. When you think closely, the haunting echoes of the Chinese approach reverberate even today. China’s Three Gorges Dam displaced 1.3 million people; immigrant workers enslaved constructing stadiums in Qatar suffered silently, thousands losing their lives. Hidden beneath the sheen of modernity, humanity is still quietly sacrificed on the altar of progress and grandeur.
