Tonight we step quietly back more than 2,200 years into Xianyang, capital of the newly unified Qin empire - a sprawling city of palaces, workshops, and roads with no wall to enclose it.

In this gentle sleep story, a Qin official in his fifties rises before dawn on an early autumn morning, two years after the unification, and walks out alone to inspect a piece of ground the growing capital will soon need. His way takes him past the halls said to reproduce the palaces of the six fallen kingdoms, down through the kilns and bronze workshops of the working quarter, and across the great timber bridge over the Wei , a river a colleague once taught him to see as the River of Stars, with the capital laid out below it like the heavens above.

On the far bank, a square of earth and long rows of seasoning timber wait to be measured.

Settle i ...