Magnificent suites of apartments were constructed that were fit to entertain a kingly company, for the Emperor when he died and was buried in this great sepulchre did not mean to be the only occupant of it. He had planned that some of his favourites from his harem should accompany him, and that men-servants and maid-servants and hosts of attendants should be shut up with him in the gloomy underground mansion. He could not bear the thought of being alone. He desired that life in some mysterious way should be continued in "The Land of Shadows" very much as it had been in the one he was forced to relinquish. His one concern in the midst of all this preparation for another life was the feeling that the great wealth that he had stored in the new palace would excite the cupidity of the thieves and the gamblers and blackmailers that had begun to exist in that early stage of the nation's history. He accordingly called in the cleverest and the most cunning artificers in brass and iron and asked them to make locks of such ingenious and subtle designs that no housebreaker would ever be able to open them. They were also to construct full-sized figures of men in metal, standing with bow and arrow in hand in front of the door by which the palace was to be entered. A touch of the intruder's foot on a secret spring would cause the mechanism of these dumb sentinels to work, and in a moment the deadly arrows would be shot into his body and he would fall lifeless on the very threshold. The safeguards against invasion of the tomb after the Emperor was laid to rest in it were complete, for none knew the secret of the locks or of the silent figures that stood ready with their arrows to slay the robber but the artificer that designed them, and in order to secure that none should ever learn it from him, he was quietly put to death one morning after he had fully explained to the Emperor the details of his wonderful invention. Another feature about Chinese life that is sadly illustrative of its seamy character is the prevalence of the opium habit, and the saddest feature about this is the fact that it is not a native vice, one indigenous to the soil, that has grown up as the result of some peculiarity of temperament of the Chinese, but is an import that was first brought into the country and made an article of trade by an English company of merchants, viz. the East India Company. One of the most unfortunate days for this old Empire was that on which the ships of that famous Company sailed up the Pearl river with their consignment of a drug that was to prove more disastrous and more fatal to its people than all the revolutions that during the past centuries have deluged this land with blood, or all the epidemics that have at various times swept like destroying angels through the ranks of society.