Chinese Gate

This giant, long gate in the style of traditional Chinese architecture now stands as the ceremonial ‘inner gate’ for all Welcoming Lot traffic.

 

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Table of Contents:

  1. The Only Gate Called a Gate
  2. Dimensions & Layout
  3. “Victor, vector.  What’s your sector?”
  4. Festive Special Protrusions
  5. History
  6. Additional Notes
  7. Novels Excerpt
  8. Location (Images Begin)
  9. Appearance Concepts
  10. 2022 Update:  Scale-model in Minecraft

 

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The Only Gate Called a Gate

The Chinese Great Gate is a stadium-sized walk-through construct fashioned after traditional and prominent Chinese architecture, such as is displayed at sites like Tiananmen Square.  Although the 12 Pearly Gates are much, much larger than this one, and although they, too, are certainly worthy of the classification ‘gate’, all 12 of them are completely hidden and disguised within the Perimeter Wall of Inisfree, and are almost completely unheard of; a trade secret of the reclusive and exclusive Inisfreeans (who are by far even more secluded and secretive than even the highborn elves of olde).  Thus, this gate is the only construct in Inisfree you will hear referred to as ‘the gate’.  Anyone on their way into Inisfree will arrive at the Welcoming Lot via this gate, and anyone leaving Inisfree will pass over the Welcoming Lot on their way out through this gate.

 

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Dimensions & Layout:

This building is 198′ from front to back, 858′ from side to side, and 365′ tall.  It is on a raised foundation spanning 330′ x 990′, and which starts the base of the building it supports at ~14 stories above local ground-level.  There is one archway/opening from its front to back, allowing the local highway-section to continue straight through the middle of its long sides.

  • 169,884 sq.ft. ‘footprint’/base
  • 326,700 sq.ft. foundation/platform
  • 330′-wide arch/opening; big enough for a highway-section (without turnaround lanes outside/beyond the shoulders)

Connection to Pearly Gate 1:

  • 462′ x 462′ drawbridge-like mega-hatch opens downward (thus all lanes of the highway touching that part of the Perimeter Wall; a 330′-wide x 462′ “long” (deep) area, are vehicle-free at all times)
  • distance from foundation (of this building) to wall (city perimeter):  924′
  • height of bottom of the ramp/hatch:  264′ above local ground-level
  • height of this building’s foundation:  ~140′; 124′ descent over 924′; slope = 1′ descent for every ~7.45′ farther from the wall (~13% grade)

Connection to the Welcoming Square:

  • highway-ramp vertical change:  140′; from building foundation/platform top… down to the paved gatherings/ceremonies area
  • distance from platform-top to highway intersection:  1,188′
  • slope:  1′ descent for every ~8.49′ (1,188/140) farther from the Chinese Great Gate’s mountain-side ; ~11% grade
  • highway intersection at/on the Welcoming Square:  flush/even with Welcoming Square surface; no slope for the exit (where the highway-lanes open up / fan out onto the Welcoming Square)

 

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“Victor, vector.  What’s your sector?”

(That’s a joke based on this movie scene.)

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vec·tor
/ˈvektər/
noun
noun: vector; plural noun: vectors
  1. MATHEMATICS•PHYSICS
    a quantity having direction as well as magnitude, especially as determining the position of one point in space relative to another.
    • a matrix with one row or one column.
    • COMPUTING
      denoting a type of graphical representation using straight lines to construct the outlines of objects.
      modifier noun: vector
  2. N/A
  3. a course to be taken by an aircraft.
verb
verb: vector; 3rd person present: vectors; past tense: vectored; past participle: vectored; gerund or present participle: vectoring
  1. direct (an aircraft in flight) to a desired point.
    “two Hurricanes were vectored towards the Stukas”

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sec·tor
/ˈsektər/
noun
noun: sector; plural noun: sectors
  1. an area or portion that is distinct from others.
    “operations in the southern sector of the North Sea”

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This construct is the final formal ‘leg’ or ‘pass’ of the Pearly Gates sequence, making it the 13th gate-proper of Inisfree’s Perimeter Wall airlock system.  From this building, all incoming traffic from the Pearly Gate/s gets directed/vectored to the different regions/sectors of Inisfree.  For many years (millennia, even), all outbound traffic intending to exit Inisfree via Pearly Gate 1 first comes here.

Land-borne vehicles carrying guests along the Glowing Art Highway (GAH) to or from the final wall-situated portal of this system will drive through the rounded tunnel linking the long-sides of this 13th gate.  

Airborne vessels, commonly called Repulsines in Inisfree, carrying guests to and from the same, final, wall-situated portal of this system will instead fly directly over this 13th gate.  

Only the hover-bikes nicknamed “Owls” are permitted for very rare trajectories through the uppermost portions of this construct’s pedestrian and vehicular traffic tunnels.

 

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Festive Special Protrusions:

Like most Inisfreean constructs, this gate is also biomechanical, growing the Christmas-light-style bulbs along its topmost edges for the Inisfreean holiday season; the 13th and final month of the Inisfreean omni-calendar.  Like these literal light-bulbs, the yurts for guest-welcoming ceremonies and showcases also biomechanically grow or ‘bloom’ up out of the square-mile parking-lot-like Welcoming Lot just on the other side of this Great Gate, gently collapsing back into themselves and disappearing when they are no longer needed.

 

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History:

Formed in 2011 near the end of Inisfree’s construction process, it was one of the crowning “cherries on top” of the whole city-building project, signifying that Inisfree was then ready enough and open for business.

In 2022, King Auz started re-christening this area with many of his favorite girls.

2023 July:  toilet-rooms added in the corners and sides of where its foundation is just above local ground-level (to help with the largest ceremonies of the Welcoming Square)

 

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Additional Notes:

This building serves as the symbolic 13th gate in the sequence of passages leading into Inisfree. Inisfreeans hold ‘lucky 13’ to be a very good number because primes provide balance, strength, and stability.

 

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Novels Excerpt:

Auz felt her eyes turn to him, and he turned his face to hers, offering a humble and fatherly smile. His heart was very glad she had enjoyed the journey and what he’d designed here. His people had done very well in taking those designs into production. Her reaction was always the one he hoped every guest and resident would have –even upon their returns, always finding more to be amazed and inspired by, even exhilarated and healed.

Next, the highway guided several degrees to the right, straightened out for half a mile, and then guided several degrees back the way it had been going, bringing them to the mile-wide Welcoming Square. There were dozens upon dozens of yurts and ger (round semi-permanent tents like the yurts, but with additional framework inside) arranged neatly on the pavement near its inner edges, along with a couple dozen more placed across the open square space between, and hundreds of people gathering amidst them. Their driver and co-driver rolled the passenger windows down, and opened the sun-roof, so that Lucifera could notice the smell of the vegan feasts being prepared in some of those tents and across their long-tables right outside.

Before they exited the highway to drive over there, another example of upscale and larger-than-life Inisfreean architecture dominated their left side; they had arrived at the inside stretch of the Chinese Gate. It was a rectangular building in the traditional Oriental style, and spanned hundreds of feet off to their side, standing more than a dozen stories tall. Giants could have walked through that gate without so much as having to duck. In its middle, one of the sections of their city’s 16-lanes-wide highway passed right through, connecting their own section of the highway with a rectangular outline on the perimeter wall which was one of the closed ramp-doors of one of their complex systems of airlock-like entry & exit routes; when that rectangular panel yawned open and down, it connected with that section of their highway, creating an over-sized drawbridge an entire army could march along –or millions of climate refugees in a hurry, if need be.

 

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Location:

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Appearance – Concepts:

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2022 Update:  Scale-model in Minecraft

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