How Many Chinamen did this kill?

The largest obelisk in ancient Egypt weighed in at 500 tons. Sheer muscle and friction built them all. Masons rubbed wooden blocks against the quarry stone while a slurry of sand and water was poured over the work surface. Slowly, very slowly, the rock was worn through. Only seldom, did these people attempt to make obelisks out of granite, which was normally far too hard. See this hyperlink:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lostempires/obelisk/bigwave.html

Interestingly, any larger obelisks, like those weighing more than 1000 tons, were left behind, unfinished and abandoned in the quarries. They are still there. Egypt, and then even Rome, once they learned their lesson, just gave up on trying to move them. It turned out that these larger projects cost far too many human lives. They can still be seen there today, unintentionally serving as the tombstone for the uncounted stone workers who died on those doomed projects.

http://www.atlantisquest.com/Baalbek.html

But the Chinese, were different. They had a secret weapon. Then as now, China had no regard for human life. That was, and still is, China's secret weapon. Around 1400 AD, China tried to build a granite tombstone for Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty. It lays there near Nanjing today, in the Yangshan quarry, unmovable then as now. Its weight is estimated to be 34,000 tons. Long before the work was attempted, Chinese engineers had to know that they could never have moved the thing an inch. After all, this rock is 34 times larger that the largest blocks that the best efforts of the Egyptians and Romans couldn't move either. The cost in human life is unknown, naturally, but as large as it was, it must have paled before the Chinese experience only a few decades just before, in the 14th century, when epidemics and famine killed 35 million people. Here is how that enormous unmovable rock looks today:

If you want to read how China was in those days, at least its navy, and see where I got this picture, read the very latest National Geographic magazine for July, 2005.