We took a taxi early Saturday morning to the Forbidden City, for many centuries the seat of the Chinese emperors. The complex is astonishingly large, eight hundred buildings arrayed along massive plazas. It was built around 1400 by a workforce of 200,000 happy campers over fourteen years. Much of the construction involved huge pillars and staircases that were constructed elsewhere but were far too heavy to move. So they flooded the streets throughout China each winter, and then moved these massive pieces over the resulting ice all the way to Beijing.