There's this stone yacht in a water garden in a park in Beijing that sometimes is a little misunderstood or taken out of context as the excesses of the imperial court when in fact it was another brilliant scheme to prevent serious problems from the military.
There was some kind of rule that any money that wasn't used by the empress herself would be available to all the generals and admirals but that the money had to be used for ship building and nothing else, so she spent as much of it as she could on a stone yacht to nowhere in order to keep it from being used to build a bunch of ships to start a war that there wasn't really enough power to win.
This is sort of like what is happening in Ukraine right now. Ever the brides' maid thought she could elevate herself through pacifying the neighbors about what Russia was really up to while playing the interior to demand a huge military build up that would then make it too easy to make impulsive decisions of a much larger nature, so an impulse was tickled a little early. It could also be considered one of those controlled burns that are used to prevent a larger fire, and this is why there were all those one hour phone calls to all the different heads of state and everyone is acting like Squiggly is extra stinky these days.
*it was also the case in Empress Cixi's day that her original design wasn't expensive enough to have the desired effect and she had to add on some extra frills and doo dads to it to get the mob done*
