Porphyry was extensively used in Byzantine imperial monuments, for example in Hagia Sophia and in the "Porphyra", the official delivery room for use of pregnant Empresses in the Great Palace of Constantinople.

Kentucky Fried Chickens hatched in Beijing; once-reviled imperial monuments were rehabilitated as theme parks; Cultural Revolutionary campfire songs were set to a rock beat.

Private citizens were also quick to adopt the more decorative motifs of imperial monuments.

A handful of brides and grooms turned up this morning anyway, to use Korea's imperial if forlorn monument as a backdrop to mark passage into a new stage of life.

Completed in 2005 and partly inspired by a destroyed imperial monument from 1898, the statue itself was paid for by private donations, with the rest of the monument mainly financed by public funding.

The emperors of Chinese dynasties venerated the Yellow Emperor's mausoleum, and most would dispatch a closely trusted high-ranked official, bearing an imperial monument written by the Emperor himself, to conduct the ceremonies.

Phocas' reign saw the erection of the last imperial monument in the Roman Forum, the column bearing his name.

Even the most important imperial monuments now showed stumpy, large-eyed figures in a harsh frontal style, in simple compositions emphasizing power at the expense of grace.

Eastmond describes Manuel's church as 'the finest surviving Byzantine imperial monument of its period.'

Its fragments recede into the past, along with the social stability that the imperial monuments were designed to reinforce.