One of my favorite stories: After the Chinese fleet was sunk en masse by the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, Cixi's government instituted a special patriotic tax to raise money for building a modern Chinese navy -- then she used all the tax money to construct her own manmade lake complete with a marble houseboat. It's nice to know some governments have been even less responsible than our own spending taxpayers' hard-earned money.
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