A fact from Yangshan Quarry appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 19 September 2011 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that the giant stele (section pictured) with which the Yongle Emperor meant to honor his father, never left the quarry?
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My main source (Yang and Lu, 2001) doesn't say a word on the decision-making involved beyond what I wrote in the article. My own personal guess (which, of course, may be wide off the mark) is that Yongle's engineers must have had a good idea of the problem from the very beginning (it is not for nothing that the 17-meter 12th-century stele from Shou Qiu is called Wan Ren Chou - "10,000 Men's Sorrow"), but everyone was afraid to break the news to the emperor. I wonder sometimes if the same was the case with the famous (and somewhat controversial) "44-zhang long, 18-zhang wide" (roughly 130 m by 54 m) treasure ships supposedly built for Zheng He's fleet at exactly the same time...
I will be on lookout for any research that would shed more light on this story, but I am not that optimistic that anyone has said a definitive word on this. I understand that the actual references to this project in Yongle era documents are quite sparse (some very brief entries in Ming Shilu, and similarly brief references in a few other contemporary works), so we may never know... By the way, there are interesting artefacts from that period - such as the "lost tortoise" near Ming Xiaoling - for which there may be no known textual references at all, after all. -- Vmenkov (talk) 20:01, 20 September 2011 (UTC)Reply
