How did they build these, and why have we stopped?

The world's fairs. The buried ground floors. The elevators that worked before electricity. Sixteen chapters on the nineteenth century, and every claim checkable at a named source.

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Second edition, expanded. Previously published as The Vanished City.

Tartaria: What Really Happened to the Buildings We Lost — book cover

Every question here is taken seriously

The buried ground floors. The vanished palaces. The star forts. The maps that named an empire and then stopped naming it. Not one of those questions is stupid, and most point at something real that mainstream education genuinely does under-teach.

This book follows each one to wherever the evidence actually goes — including, in several chapters, somewhere other than where you may have heard it goes. Where that happens, it says so plainly. Vagueness would be a kind of flattery, and you would not be buying this book to be flattered.

What turns up is not a consolation prize. It is better material.

Four things you will find inside

Chapter Four

Two million people, lifted by water

The Eiffel Tower opened in 1889 and carried the public to the top from the first day — not by electricity, but by hydraulics. Under London, a public grid of high-pressure water mains drove the city's lifts, cranes and theatre machinery until 1977. The elevators really did predate electricity. They ran on water.

Chapter Seven

Chicago lifted itself out of the mud

There was no down — dig a trench and it filled with water. So the city laid its sewers on top of the streets and raised the streets over them. In 1861 a grand hotel went up six feet while it stayed open for business. Owners who declined to pay watched their ground floor become a basement.

Chapter Two

An empire really was erased

Not on a map. The Dzungar Khanate was the last great steppe empire — a state with a dynasty, an army and its own diplomacy. Between 1755 and 1758 it was destroyed as a people. The emperor's own orders survive. Almost no educated adult in the West has heard the name.

Chapter Ten

A subway ran under Broadway, and the city never approved it

Alfred Beach held a permit to run pneumatic tubes for mail. He used it to dig a subway instead — at night, in secret, under a working street, funding it himself so nobody at City Hall could stop him before it opened. It carried paying passengers for two years in a car pushed by a giant fan.

Fifty buildings, named and located

The commonest question about this subject is also the fairest one: where exactly is this, and what is it called?

The last chapter answers it fifty times. Seattle's buried streets. The medieval upper walkways of Chester, still open and still free. Lower Wacker Drive. The building on Broadway where the first passenger elevator was installed in 1857, still standing. Each one named, located and dated, so you can go and stand in front of it.

Sixteen chapters, 100 pages

Seven of them were written for this edition, in answer to what readers and viewers kept asking.

1
The Name on the Map
What Tartaria meant, who used the word, and why it was never a neutral term.
2
The Cartographic Record, and the Empire That Really Was Erased
How atlases were actually made, and the steppe nation destroyed while the name faded.
3
How They Actually Built It
Ornament ordered from a catalogue, and the mathematics behind the star forts.
4
The Machine That Made Height Possible
Elevators before electricity: steam, hydraulics, and the water grid under London that ran until 1977.
5
Why the Rooms Were So Tall
Daylight, gas lamps and disease theory — and why ceilings came down within a single lifetime.
6
The Greatest Disposable City Ever Built
Chicago 1893, Paris 1900, and why the palaces were designed to be brief.
7
The Cities That Rose
Chicago on jackscrews, the Seattle underground, and the purple glass in the pavement.
8
The Cities Above the Street
Upper streets that are real, open and free to walk on — and the famous pictures of ones that never existed.
9
Doors and Stairs That Go Nowhere
Seven explanations, and a straight answer on the airships.
10
Technology That Really Did Disappear
Pneumatic post, a secret subway under Broadway, and the trades that ended.
11
The Buildings That Powered Themselves
The four utility networks a nineteenth-century building was plugged into, all of them now gone.
12
The People Behind the Buildings
The names missing from every other account of this subject.
13
A Timeline of the Question
How this discussion grew, and what changed when it crossed into English.
14
Reading the Picture
How to tell a photograph from a rendering, a retouched postcard, or a generated image.
15
How to Look for Yourself
The archives, the insurance maps, and how to settle most of this in an afternoon.
16
A Gazetteer
Fifty named buildings and streets, with locations, where every argument in this book can be checked.

Plus a preface, a reading guide and a full glossary.

Is this book for you?

Yes, if

  • You've asked how they built these and never got a real answer
  • You'd rather be shown the source than told the conclusion
  • You want to check things for yourself afterwards

No, if

  • You want the mud flood confirmed — this book argues it isn't
  • You want a lost civilisation rather than a documented one
  • You'd prefer open questions to answers you might dislike

Tartaria

What Really Happened to the Buildings We Lost

$29.95

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Anything else?

How do I read it?
After paying you get an email with a link. Click it and the book opens — on a phone, a tablet, or a computer. There is nothing to install. If you'd rather read on paper, you can print it.
I bought the first edition. Do I have to buy it again?
No. Every future edition is included in the original purchase — use your original download link and you'll get the new one. If it doesn't work, write to hello@thetartarianarchive.com and we'll sort it out.
It used to be called The Vanished City. Is this a different book?
Same book, considerably longer. The first edition had nine chapters and 58 pages; this one has sixteen and 100. The original nine are unchanged apart from renumbering.
Does this book debunk Tartaria?
In several places, yes — and it says so at the front rather than burying it. The book concludes that the old maps do not evidence a single unified empire, and that the mud flood gets the observation right but the cause wrong.

What it never does is sneer. Every question is treated as worth asking. If you want confirmation, this will frustrate you. If you want to know what actually happened, it won't.
Is it the same as the videos?
No. The chapters go a good deal deeper, and seven of the sixteen have never been covered on the channel at all.
What if something goes wrong?
Write to hello@thetartarianarchive.com and we'll sort it out — a lost email, a link that won't open, anything at all. A real person answers.