Emperor's Soul - Imperial Wing

Moving on to the Imperial Wing - a stark difference with its gold ornaments and hallways lined with ancient portraits and artifacts.

I knew I wanted to have gold engravings on grey walls, as I saw architecture like this on my Taiwan visit and loved the simple elegance. So at first I was playing with some different ways of going about it, but in the end went with something rather close to the original traditional Chinese letters, just that I am using a fantasy script instead. Here are some other design ideas I considered (most of them felt too modern to me):