A State-Owned Enterprise Section Chief Stirs Up Trouble in the Forbidden Palace of the Late Qing

In the third year of Xuantong, Beijing was like a giant corpse dressed in a magnificent shroud. It still bore the stately outline of a celestial empire, but time had hollowed it out from within, leaving behind a smell mingled with sandalwood, opium, and rotting timber. Here, time was no river flowing forward, but a mire slowly fermenting and endlessly circling back on itself. The sun rose and the moon set; bells and drums marked the hours. Everything followed strict rules, yet those rules seemed to exist only to prove that they still existed. The floor tiles of the Palace of Heavenly Purity remained ice-cold, and the vermilion comments on memorials were still bloodred. But the lines between them had long since lost the force that once commanded mountains and rivers in the days of Kangxi and Qianlong. All that remained were polished, weary platitudes, keeping up the last vestiges of dignity for a sprawling empire.