Rumours over excavator at Beijing’s Forbidden City highlight mystique surrounding massive, mostly-lost Yongle encyclopaedia

An excavator was seen digging at nighttime near an entrance gate to Beijing’s Forbidden City

But authorities said it was just routine electrical work, despite rumours they had found parts of the Yongle Dadian

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The Yongle Dadian on display at The National Library of China in 2014. Source: Handout

Published: 4:37pm, 22 Sep 2021Updated: 4:43pm, 22 Sep 2021

A construction project near Beijing’s Forbidden City forced authorities to publicly debunk rumours that they had discovered one of China’s most famous lost artefacts.

Last week, an excavator was spotted outside the Dong Hua Gate at night, sparking a debate about whether volumes of the mostly-lost Yongle Dadian, or Yongle encyclopaedia, had been discovered.

The debate became so popular that authorities had to issue a statement that said they were performing routine electrical work and had chosen nighttime to minimise traffic disruptions.

An excavation project in Beijing sparked rumours that authorities had found the long-lost Yongle Dandian, but it was only routine electrical work. Photo: Weibo

The Yongle Dadian contained nearly 23,000 scrolls in 11,095 volumes and has long sparked the imagination of people who believe it held knowledge lost to time.

The massive work was commissioned in 1403 by Emperor Yongle, a Ming dynasty ruler known for moving the Chinese capital to Beijing.

It took 2,169 scholars five years to complete. The encyclopaedia, which covers a range of traditional Chinese knowledge from important literary works of the time, is thought to have contained over 370 million Chinese characters, making it the largest encyclopaedia ever created.