Oh, for a great mansion of ten thousand
rooms
Where all the poor on earth could find
welcome shelter
Steady through every storm, secure as a
mountain!
Ah, were such a building to spring up
before me,
I would freeze to death in my wrecked
hut well content.
—Tu Fu, ‘My Thatched Hut is Wrecked
by
the Autumn Wind’, 8th Century
AD
