Unfinished giant stele in Yangshan Quarry

The stele, quarried 600 years ago by the orders of the Yongle Emperor in the Yangshan Quarry east of Nanjing, would have stood 73 m tall if it had been possible to move and install it. But since it wasn’t, it’s still sitting in its quarry... There are two separate pieces, visible in this video: the stele crown (in front) and the stele body (lying horizontally, in the background). The stele base is in a nearby pit some 100 m away, not seen in this video. For more details about the site, and literature references (in both Chinese and English), please see Although Yangshan Quarry has been on the provincial list of protected monuments since 1956, and is shown on tourist maps etc., and is accessible from Nanjing with an inexpensive bus ride and an easy walk, it is comparatively little visited. When I was there in Feb 2011, I only saw one other small group of hikers. However, that’s not a unique situation: there are many impressive monuments in China hardly visited by anyone; see e.g. , for a report about China’s largest *installed* (on turtles!) stelae.