阿房宫

This guide to Epang Palace outside Xi'an follows archaeologist Li Yufang, who spent five years with her team drilling thousands of test holes across this rammed-earth platform searching for something specific: the scorched soil and ash that a two-thousand-year-old legend said should be here. That legend held that the First Emperor's palace, so vast it was said to swallow a valley, was burned for three months by the rebel general Xiang Yu after the Qin dynasty fell. The historian Sima Qian recorded that story, and poets for two millennia afterward described halls climbing over hills and covered bridges crossing rivers of their own.