Old Chinese palace in Siberia ?

[Nungali]

http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/f0009-who-built-this-siberian-summer-palace-and-why/

[Taomeow]

Fascinating.  Like something straight from Louis Cha's novel, The Deer And The Cauldron, whose low-born but very lucky protagonist befriends Emperor Kangxi and at one point travels all the way from Beijing to Moscow with a stop at a secret fortress in Siberia that apparently connects both countries with underground tunnels, seduces the Russian tsarina Catherine the Great while at it, and so on.  There was a secret island too in the novel (though in a different location), a conspiratorial abode of a bunch of, well, conspirators with the long arm of their hidden power extending all the way to Beijing and pulling assorted imperial strings...   (An aside: people familiar with Chinese or Russian or any, for that matter, history get a good belly laugh when someone sneers at what they call "conspiracy theories" as though it's something ridiculous -- because history is pretty much nothing but...  the aforementioned tsarina, e.g., was placed on the throne as the outcome of one such conspiracy culminating in a coup.)  My first thought was, this mysterious Chinese palace could have served a similar purpose...  And the Uigur, incidentally, have been incited into clashes with the Han Chinese lately after many centuries of peaceful coexistence...  nothing conspiratorial behind the scenes, obviously, just out of the blue...  like all those blue, orange, yellow revolutions...  but don't let me digress.  Thanks for posting.