The construction of the Capital of the Realm was begun shortly after the enthronement of the first Emperor. Until that time the ceremonies and functions of state were conducted in temporary halls of grass and reeds, or in the open air, but the Emperor and his high officials were busily mobilizing the people and capital of the nearby districts to construct the centerpiece of the Realm, where the Emperor and all the lords, as well as all the lesser clans attached to them, the people who waited on them and specialists who possessed outstanding talents, were to reside. The Emperor himself chose the site by shooting a golden arrow into the air, which struck the ground at a place just south of the Always-Flowing River that cut horizontally across the Central Meadows and less than three miles to the east of the Axial Dendron.
The Mountain-of-Heaven Duke, scion of Eternal-One, was a famous architect who had already built up his own home city in an excellent style, and because of that the Emperor put him in charge of the project. A guild of three thousand earth-movers, carpenters and stonemasons was recruited and placed under his control. The plan he came up with would have the city rise out of a tessellation of channels cut into the earth that were to be filled with water from the Always-Flowing River. Three equidistant channels were drawn longitudinally from the river. The second channel went straight through the center of the city, while the first and third channels went far enough to circumscribe the western and eastern limits of a square, and two more channels were etched latitudinally of such a distance from one another as to form a perfect square around the centerpoint. Another channel linked the western and eastern limits through the center horizontally. Each side was 1600 fathoms, but the inner city walls--20 feet tall--were laid 200 fathoms beyond the channels, giving the inner city a total length of 2000 fathoms. A second channel-square was inscribed within the main one which was half its size. These were the primary channels, uniformly of a width of ten fathoms. Smaller channels were cut in variegated patterns out of the remaining land, so that no place in the city was more than a five minute walk from water. Everywhere the water was three fathoms deep, and it could be crossed at one of the more than sixty stone bridges that were built.
By the tireless exertions of the earth-movers, the entire ground was leveled so that it was exactly five feet above the surface of the water, but using the soil that had been removed in astonishing volumes from the earth, all the land inside the smaller channel-square was raised by three fathoms. The raising was repeated two more times at increasingly smaller radii, until there was a total of four levels in the city, each smaller in area than the last, but equal in height. The sides of the raised levels were lined in megaliths and staircases were constructed at all the major avenues. Starting with the third level, the channels were covered by vaulted ceilings to increase the amount of usable land above them. For the channels that were by this alteration rendered underground, facilities were installed that transformed them into public baths that could fit thousands of people at once. Fire chambers were chiseled beneath the bath-pools to warm them, and they were open for anybody to use at any time without a fee. From there a great deal of earth was hollowed out to form new spaces, from cramped niches to cisterns and vast antechambers, arranged in a labyrinthine network used as storage rooms, dormitories for servants, cellars and chutes and tunnels for the removal of waste.
On the day the last stone of the city's foundation was laid, the Emperor bestowed plots upon each of the titled families. The size of the plots as well as their distance from the city center (and hence their altitude) was determined by the rank held by the family, with Kings occupying the top layer alongside the Emperor, Dukes the third, Knights and Masters the second and Barons the first, although there turned out to be more land on the first level than there were families titled Baron, and these extra plots were doled out to other respected and pecunious families. The land at ground level was assigned to guilds and commoner families who had business at the court, and numerous other parcels were set aside to build barracks, temples, libraries, gymnasia and travelers' lodges. Over a million stone bricks were cut and carved and spread at three collonade-skirted plazas in the northwest, northeast and southeast corners of the inner city, buttressed by the corners of the outer channel-square, which were to be used as marketplaces or else to serve as the venues of speeches and debates concerning the questions of the day. And shrines of sizes ranging from the miniature to the grand were set up for the veneration of tutelary spirits.
The Emperor's palace, when it was completed, was by an enormous margin the most stately building in the City, and the most elegant. It had twelve courtyards, six internal gardens, twenty grand halls and over sixty lesser halls, not to mention halls of so many different shapes and sizes as one may find among the leaves that carpet the forest. The doors of the front gate were sixteen feet tall and coated in gold, and so were the doors of the thirty-five foot-tall throne hall, whose front-facing segment was ten fathoms long and five wide, but the throne room itself stretched backwards beyond the hall in an annex that, after ten fathoms, terminated at another perpendicular segment of equal size as the front-facing one, so that the total length of the throne room was twenty fathoms. The space between the two termini opened into two opulent gardens to the right and left of the throne hall, and these were spacious enough to let the rising sun light up the hall in the morning, and the setting sun in the evening, so long as the sky was not cloudy. The throne hall was connected to the other great and lesser halls by covered walkways, or alternatively one who wished to appreciate the beauty of the flowers and trees and bushes could go by paved trails or stepping stones that traced winding paths through the green areas, where there were numerous ponds and streams shielded by boulders of dignified shapes and other magnificent landscapes, and a few of the grottoes and glades were so thickly cloaked in vegetation that one standing there would forget he was in a palace. The palace library consisted of five halls in the eastern quadrant arranged so that a vast courtyard was in between them, and at the center of this courtyard a small chapel was constructed to house the Sacred Mirror. The library itself had room enough for two hundred thousand books and scrolls, although it took almost a hundred years to reach capacity, and over the centuries it was expanded several times.
Going through the throne hall, one would pass into smaller rooms where the Emperor would hold meetings of a more private nature, and rooms for receiving guests, inspecting tribute and dispatching decrees and missions and scriptoria where drafts and duplicates were produced. Going past these, these one would reach the entrance to the north palace, where the apartments of the Emperor and his family were, but this quadrant was by far the largest, taking up as it did three tenths of the size of the entire palace. The main hall here contained the Emperor's study and his personal apartments, and connected to it on the other end by a semi-shaded terrace flanked by lattice fences was the suite of rooms that was to belong to the Empress. Another large garden surrounded three out of the fours sides of the area containing these two buildings, at the center of which was a lake. The lake was fed by a waterfall installed into a hill in the northwest corner, which was itself fed by water pumped from the underground canals, and two streams leading away from this lake were dug, conducting the water westward and eastward, and made to meander through the grass and flowers and trees not unlike a snake, and because such a plenitude of trees were planted in its vicinity, it was often covered in a gloss of leaves and blossoms whose exact appearance depended on what season it was, but it was an especially fantastic sight in autumn when the yellow and orange leaves that had already fallen combined with the reflection of those still attached to the trees, so that the river appeared solid enough to walk on. The garden--the largest in the palace--was two times longer than it was wide, and both the northern and southern edges were lined with halls. In addition to the living quarters of ladies and maids, there were also buildings serving as bath houses, lounges, music rooms and ice houses for easing tedium and the influence of the elements, and school halls for the education of Imperial children.
Every building in the palace was uniquely shaped, yet all were united in the colors of their walls and roofs and the style of the illuminated vignettes and pillasters carved into their square wooden posts and beams. And the distance between each post was fixed at one fathom; the height of first floors was fixed at one and a half fathoms, while that of second floors was one fathom, but in fact very few had more than one. The motifs used to decorate the eaves were of a uniform style designed by the Emperor himself. And as for the roofs, they were all pitched at fourty-five degrees and the staggered tiles they were coated in were glazed and blue to invoke the visage of Heaven. The palace was the most impressive that had even been built, and it was looked to as a model by architects for many centuries to come.
If one were to describe the houses built by the other lords, they would in fact be quite similar to Emperor's palace, however smaller and less grand, for obviously nothing could compare with it, but that fine palace did indeed radiate a kind of light that made all the other buildings look many times more magnificent than they ever would be without it. And thus the towering city rose out of the ground, wearing the city walls as a woman wears a skirt. It was extremely tall, and when sun was setting, its shadow was so vast that crickets would begin their songs early.
The land beyond the walls was also transformed into a place that had the same air of elegance of the city, yet less densely packed with people and houses, for it was a place nobles and their retainers would frequent in order to enjoy the cool breezes that were the natural endowment of the Central Meadows. While a lot of the land in these outskirts was left as it was, some was set aside to be made into gardens, parks, colonnades, arboretums, menageries, hedge-mazes and ponds.
To the west of the City was the meadow where the Axial Dendron stood, which was soon connected to the eastern gate by a paved road three fathoms wide. Now that permanent residences had been constructed, the temporary lodges that attended the Axial Dendron were taken down, and in their place, construction was begun on a massive compound of temples and shrines. There were the Temples of Heaven and Earth, which Towering-Justice personally designed so as to match in composition and style the temples of the same name in the Fields of Purity that Tengir had built in the previous epoch. A temple to Tengir himself was also built, and smaller shrines were placed in its vicinity where the sons and daughters of Tengir were venerated. Child-of-Earth was also enshrined there under the name Divine-Land-Yielder, and both Divine-Stream-Princess and Divine-Sunflower-Princess were enshrined as a single divinity, the Divine Bride. Right behind the Axial Dendron was constructed a reliquary where a copy of the Law was enshrined. A master scribe was commissioned to create the copy, which contained the Law in 10 volumes with pages made of gold leaf. The volume was then sanctified by the priests. In that very same district Towering-Justice invited a number of religious orders to establish monasteries and nunneries, and in total several hundreds of holy practitioners went there to live. These holy practitioners worked with the priests and priestesses of the temples to put together all their knowledge of things exoteric and esoteric, which was then written out in books, and five libraries were constructed to store the books. The first three were open for all to use, one was only for advanced practitioners, and the final and smallest library was forbidden to all except the innermost circle of masters and officials. The most learned among the teachers, masters and scholars also set up schools where they gave lectures on the texts and their meanings, as well as on all sorts of other things, to the children of noble households.