The Empress Dowager wished to leave the palace, yet the Emperor still disagreed. After all, his elderly mother was now in her seventies, not seventeen!
In Xuanyuan Country, the common folk consider sixty a ripe old age.
"Mother, the frontier is bitterly remote. You are advanced in years and can't endure the hardships of travel by cart and boat. I truly can't rest easy and I won't agree to it," he said.
The Empress Dowager replied, "It's precisely because I'm advanced in years that I want to leave the palace and see this prosperous age's mountains and rivers. While I can still move about, I want to look around everywhere. In a hundred years, I will then be able to tell your father the Emperor what this prosperous age's mountains and rivers were like!"
