A live-streamed Chinese language lesson under the sky—the ancients were taken aback.

"The rest of the text is all comparisons."

When writing about precious treasures, why is it that every last bit is taken, yet they are squandered like dirt? Zi and zhu are extremely small units of weight in ancient times, and every little bit must be collected, yet when used, they are wasted like spilling dirt.

These are all questions raised by Du Mu.

Your Majesty, do you know that there are more pillars supporting the beams in this palace than farmers working in the fields?

There are more roof rafters than female workers on looms;

Those countless nail heads were more numerous than the grains of rice in the granary;

The gaps between the tiles are more numerous than the loose threads on the clothes of ordinary people.

The railings, arranged horizontally and vertically, are longer than the city walls of the entire country.

The noise from the palace playing instruments and singing was louder than the conversations on the street.

Through six contrasting examples, the author juxtaposes the splendor of the palace with the poverty of the people, presenting a powerful and overwhelming argument that directly points to the Qin rulers' extreme exploitation of the people's labor.

[They cut down every last leek, spending money like water being poured out.]

Every penny counts

[Warning: High Alert!]

……

The background music in the video suddenly changed, creating a sense of impending doom.

He hesitated to speak, then composed himself.

"Everyone, please note that the series of comparisons just now brought the emotions of the entire article to a climax," Du Mu said again.

"This has caused the people of the world to dare not speak out but only dare to be angry. The tyrant's heart has grown increasingly arrogant and stubborn."

These two lines are the finishing touch in "The Rhapsody on the Epang Palace," describing the eve of the Qin Dynasty's ruling crisis. They accurately depict a social state that is outwardly silent but inwardly boiling with turmoil.

Public resentment deepened in silence, while the tyrant grew increasingly arrogant in isolation.

This simultaneous deterioration is a structural precursor to the collapse of everything. Contradictions are accumulating rapidly, and the rulers are not only oblivious to it, but are also creating more contradictions.

This moment feels like the brief calm before you plummet from the top of a roller coaster.

And unfortunately, those sitting on the roller coaster have no idea what will happen next.

How long will this calm last? What happened next?

"Du Mu described this palace as a paradise on earth, and depicted the lives of the Qin Dynasty rulers as extravagant and arrogant, with all the wealth, beauties, and treasures of the entire empire concentrated here."

Then, with a sudden shift in his writing style, he used just fourteen characters to plunge everything into an abyss.

The garrison soldiers cried out, Hangu Pass fell, the Chu army set it ablaze, leaving only scorched earth.

Chen Sheng and Wu Guang launched an uprising, and Liu Bang captured Hangu Pass.

When Xiang Yu entered Xianyang, he set fire to the Qin Dynasty palaces, and the fire raged for three months.

Here, a torch is simply a blaze; the action is very simple and easy.

Then, the Epang Palace, which had exhausted human resources and drained the people's wealth, was reduced to a charred ruin in the blink of an eye.

The Qin Dynasty is finished.

The Qin Dynasty is finished.

The Qin Dynasty is finished.

[It still only lasted two generations.]

The Qin Dynasty's exploitation of the people's manpower was truly ruthless.

My enormous Epang Palace is gone!

【well……】

……

On the hillside of Bolangsha, Zhang Liang was taking a walk.

He stopped in his tracks as the sky brightened. Upon hearing of the fall of the six kingdoms, his hands slowly clenched in his sleeves.

He was Korean, and he lived his whole life to remember the moment when the state of Korea was destroyed by Qin.

But now he knew that if he just waited, the Qin Dynasty would collapse on its own.

He exhaled a soft breath and continued walking down the mountain.

"Have I misjudged?" Ying Ji's voice suddenly became very low. "The Qin Dynasty perished after only two generations?"

Bai Qi helped him up.

Fan Ju, standing to the side, turned deathly pale.

The Qin Dynasty was densely packed, its image constantly drifting across the sky and reflected on everyone's face.

Ying Zheng felt completely drained, and his ominous premonition came true.

He slumped onto the throne, closing his eyes in agony, but soon opened them again, staring intently at the sky that was still narrating.

He swallowed the metallic taste rising in his throat, forcing himself not to collapse.

He glanced at the kneeling, terrified officials below him and said, "Get up and continue reading."

It hasn't happened yet, so it can still be changed.

"At this point, I would like to ask you to think about a question: Why did Du Mu use the fu (a type of Chinese prose-poem) style?"

The characteristics of fu (a type of classical Chinese prose-poem) are elaborate descriptions and parallel structures, and extreme embellishment. Emperor Wu of Han was very fond of this style of writing, and it was very popular in the Han Dynasty.

But after Du Mu used extensive descriptions of extravagance, he suddenly shifted gears in the final paragraph, concluding with pure reasoning and argumentation. He was essentially using the shell of a fu (a type of Chinese prose-poem) to contain the core of an argumentative essay.

"I believe everyone still remembers the last paragraph vividly. Let's review how brilliant that discussion was."

"The six states were destroyed by the six states themselves, not by Qin; Qin was destroyed by Qin itself, not by the world."

This statement was earth-shattering. Everyone has always said that Qin's tyranny led to its demise after only two generations, but Du Mu said, "You destroyed yourself."

What defeated you was not your opponent, but your own actions.

[Well... in fact, it was indeed some fool who wiped out his entire family.]

Brutality was only the least problematic aspect of the second generation.

"If we take this logic a step further, we arrive at that famous saying: 'The people of Qin had no time to mourn themselves, yet later generations mourned them. If later generations mourned them but did not learn from their mistakes, they would only cause later generations to mourn again.'"

Note the progressive relationship in this sentence.

The first level: The people of Qin did not have time to grieve for themselves; it was later generations who grieved for them.

The second level: If later generations only grieve but do not learn from this experience.

Then the third level: those who come after will grieve for this "descendant".

The four layers, each linked to the next, transform the rise and fall of a dynasty into a cyclical historical pattern.

Reading this, a profound sense of historical desolation and powerlessness immediately welled up within me.

The video shows four circular nodes that light up in sequence.

The Qin people perished before they could even grieve, and Han dynasty historians wrote "On the Faults of Qin" on bamboo slips.

Different palaces were built in different dynasties, and the construction scenes of each palace were exactly the same as those of the Qin Dynasty, the Han Dynasty's Shanglin Garden, the Tang Dynasty's Huaqing Palace, and the Song Dynasty's Genyue Garden. Every dynasty was repeating the same action.

The camera rapidly switches between repetitive scenes, showing Du Mu writing "Ode to the Epang Palace" by candlelight, his pen trembling.

All four rings lit up, forming a circle that began to rotate slowly. In the center of the circle was a mirror, and the images in the mirror kept changing: the fall of the Qin Dynasty, the fall of the Han Dynasty, the decline of the Tang Dynasty, and the southward migration of the Song Dynasty.

It keeps repeating, forever.

Li Shimin stood under the corridor. When he heard the words "later generations lamented it but did not learn from it," his fingers slowly clenched in his sleeves. He was a person who had witnessed the collapse of the Sui Dynasty.

Emperor Yang of Sui, who embarked on massive construction projects, built the Eastern Capital, opened the Grand Canal, and launched campaigns against Goguryeo, draining the lives of the entire nation. In the end, he was strangled to death in Jiangdu by his own ministers.

The Li family's empire was built on the ruins of the Sui Dynasty.

Therefore, he felt the pain of "later generations lamenting but not learning from it" more deeply than anyone else.

He wasn't worried about himself; he was already old, and he had done everything he should and shouldn't have done in his life.

But he worried about his descendants. Why did Du Mu, a Tang Dynasty poet, write "The Rhapsody on the Epang Palace"?

Li Shimin gave a bitter smile; his descendants ultimately failed to learn their lesson.