Thursday, February 01, 2007
Ancient Observatory
Almost every day, I drive by a surviving section of the Second Ring Wall of Beijing which has some ancient celestial orbs and gauges on it. Today, we decided to take a closer look. The most amazing artifact (to me) is a large orb with the stars plotted on it. It is amazing from 2 aspects: it was made in the 1600’s, which is earlier than I thought the heavens were mapped and more impressively, the large orb was cast in metal. The engineering alone is rather complex for something that size.
