Not far from the Chinese Nanjing is the Yangshan quarry, where for many centuries stone was mined for the construction of buildings in Nanjing. Now it is a historical monument, which is famous primarily for its huge unfinished stele of the 15th century A. D. e.
There are things that we just cannot understand. All over the world there is evidence that in the distant past, ancient civilizations were capable of great things. The unfinished stele from the Yangshan Quarry is not so distant past, but it is as impressive as the Cyclopean ruins of Baalbek or buildings in Peru.
Emperor Yongle, who ruled in the 15th century, in 1405 ordered the creation of a huge stone stele, which was supposed to be installed at the Xiaolin Mausoleum, where his father was buried. The stone stele was supposed to consist of three parts and then it was supposed to assemble them into a single whole, but this was never done due to the truly enormous dimensions of the idea.
Just look at the dimensions of these three blocks:
1) The base stele is 30.35 meters long, 13 meters thick and 16 meters high. It weighs about 16.250 tons.
2) The body stela is 49.4 meters long, 10.7 meters wide and 4.4 meters thick. Weighs 8,799 tons.
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3) The head stele is 10.7 meters high, 20.3 meters wide and 8.4 meters thick. Weighs 6.118 tons.
When finished, the stele would be a whopping 73 meters high with a total weight of 31,300 tons! The stele from the Yangshan quarry is the largest megalithic stele in the world.
And before the world learned about the Chinese stele, the unfinished obelisk from Aswan (Egypt) was considered the largest. Its length is almost 42 meters, and its weight is "only" 1200 tons.
The Aswan obelisk could not be raised.
Chinese workers cut out three parts of the stele and have already started processing them (most of all they managed to process the head part of the stele), when it became clear that no number of people could in any way move these blocks from the quarry to the mausoleum, let alone lift these parts on top of each other.
Ultimately, after much thought, the grandiose project was abandoned and to this day reminds all researchers that even the ancient builders had their limits.
