The flower-and-rock convoys
Huizong loved stones to the point of obsession, and set up an office at Suzhou to hunt down the southeast’s rare flowers and stones, shipping them to Kaifeng ten boats to a "convoy" to build the Genyue. To move one great stone, they would tear down bridges, ruin city gates, and knock through people’s houses. In Fang La’s rebellion proclamation, the flower-and-rock convoys were the number-one charge. The Genyue was finished less than five years when the Jin besieged the city: its rare birds were caught for army rations, its exotic stones smashed into cannon shot — the empire’s aesthetic project ended by supplying the attackers with ammunition.
Watching the sky from a well at Wuguo City
In the second year of Jingkang, the Jin carried Emperors Huizong and Qinzong, with the clan, consorts, and craftsmen — more than fourteen thousand people — north. Huizong was styled "Marquis of Muddled Virtue," a humiliating title, and moved from place to place in captivity at Wuguo City (modern Yilan, Heilongjiang). Legend has him "sitting in a well watching the sky"; in truth he was confined in a courtyard, writing the quatrain, "All night the west wind shakes the broken door, one lamp faint in a lonely, desolate lodge." He died in captivity eight years later. A man who could paint the auspicious clouds of Auspicious Cranes made, as his last work, the music of a fallen state.