Huáng chéng
The city at the mouth of the God River has many names. The City of Topaz, the City of Gold, the City of Gods, the City of Whores. The Old City, the First City, the One City. The Grand Lady. The Great Stink. We will call it Huáng Chéng, the Yellow City, which is what the people of his home call it, because of the way it glows in the light of hot sunny days.
Demographics
It never fails to impress a visitor to the Yellow City that its citizens are by turns the wealthiest, most refined, and most educated people in all Yoon Suin , yet at the same time capable of the most malicious cruelties and licentious depravities. Like all those whose societies are ancient and rich, they are also cynical and filled with ennui.
The most singular feature of their life, which strikes any visitor the moment he arrives, is their strict hierarchical stratification, which all inhabitants obey without question.
In the highest strata are the slug-people, the race who built civilizationwho have lived there since, they say, the dawn of time. They alone are permitted to own fixed property, to import and export goods, and to attend many of the city's libraries, archives and madrassas. They are a pompous and effete people, fascinated by clothes and fashions and the decoration of their own appearances, though they love learning and study and pursuits scientific, aesthetic and sorcerous
Below the slug-people are human beings, who are themselves separated into castes. Some are warriors in private employ (for there is no public military in the Yellow City), others are shopkeepers or sailors, while others fight for money or sell their love (the whores in the Yellow City being notable for their beauty and skill). Their lowest rank is called the ulufo, the people who herd giant cockroaches in the darkest alleyways. These cockroaches eat the city's litter and are in turn eaten by their herders, a sight which can be seen on any street corner around the docks and the river side.
Lowest of all are the crab-people, who live outside the city in the mangroves and the rocks called the Topaz Islands, and are not permitted to enter the city proper except in servitude. They are unintelligent things, but strong and tough, and they are sometimes forced to do manual labor or simple tasks, on pain of death or torture and for scant reward. They are undoubtedly unfortunate and pathetic beings, very meek of character, though the people of the city think of them as the reincarnated souls of criminals and breakers of taboo, and deserving of their miserable lot. They do not generally have names, though those in employment
are often daubed with paint to signify who is their master.
Government
The seventeen cartels are the most powerful bodies in the Yellow City, and their leaders, who sit in council once a month, are what passes for ruler ship there. These families are slug men all. One can sometimes see them about the town, being carried on palanquins by muscular eunuchs from Druk Yul. Usually their power is only outdone by their corpulence.
Infrastructure
The people of the Yellow City are many and varied, but they are united in their love for three things: opium, knowledge, and tea.
It is difficult to say which of these vices is the worse, for all have their merits and their flaws. Opium keeps the people in a pleasant state of bliss. But its abuse is widely acknowledged to cause loss of ambition. Knowledge makes the city a seat of learning the envy of all the land. Yet its pursuit has given the Yellow City a surfeit of sophists and learned fools. Tea pleasures the tongue. But it also makes
the bladder weak.
Opium, knowledge and tea each flow down the God River to the city in a constant stream. The opium and tea comes from distant Sughd, where growing conditions are best.
Knowledge comes from traders, but also from the exploring clamorknowledge of the world outside, since they leave the Yellow City so rarely, and so they give patronage to institutions which send men forth to gather strange beasts, draw maps, and survey for minerals. There is more knowledge forgotten there, men say, than is known today many times over - in ancient books and scrolls written in languages no longer understood.
Guilds and Factions
The city has many thieves bands and cartels due it's nature as a trade hub and it's love of opium, monopolize
Exploration guilds take on jobs to fill the slug men libraries. The biggest of these exploring guilds is the League of the Road, whose home is in a great palace many thousands of years old: its ceilings are painted deep blue and dotted with white spots which resemble distant stars, signifying to its members the nature of their desires. The League sends explorers far and wide, ranging over Yoon-Suin, seeking ever more about the world and its contents. It claims to have a menagerie of beasts deep in its halls that no outsider has ever seen, and its archive has as many books as there are people in the Yellow City
Architecture
There are two things that the visitor will note as soon as he arrives. The first is that the city is yellow. Although this is naturally to be expected from the name, it is no less striking when one sees it for the first time. The rock from which the buildings are made glows like gold in the sun, from the topaz shot through it, so even from a great distance one can see it sparkling like some barbarian’s image of heaven. (It is only when one starts to smell it that one realizes how far this is from the truth.)
The second is the river. Or, rivers. At the Yellow City is where the God River, running down from the north, meets the sea, and shatters into a great delta. The city has grown up around the waterways, almost as if the sediment and detritus washed downstream has built up about the mouth of the river, layer on layer, over thousands of years, until one day it came to be a living metropolis and the city was born.
Everywhere are palaces, towers, temples, tenements and domes of different styles and heritages, which have been converted into residences, religious institutions, offices of bureaucrats, indoor markets, ghettos and back again many times over.
On the river banks, one always finds temples and shrines. The Yellow City is a city of gods, and this is one of the reasons why the God River is so called. Nobody can count the many spirits, divinities, powers and deities worshiped there. But each has their temple, each their cult, each their little patch of the river bank. The scent of incense mixes with the stench of blood sacrifices and sewage whenever one finds oneself close to the water.
Alternative Name(s)
The Yellow City,The City of Topaz, The City of Gold, The City of Gods, The City of Whores, The Old City, The First City, The One City, The Grand Lady, The Great Stink
Type
Large city
Population
1,500,000
Inhabitant Demonym
The Yellow City People
Location under
Owning Organization
Characters in Location
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