The other half of the reign is told in the treatise on the feng and shan sacrifices that Sima Qian placed in his history, and it is one of the sharpest pieces of religious reporting in the ancient world. A sequence of fangshi came to court. One proposed that cinnabar be transmuted into gold, that vessels made from that gold would extend the life of anyone who ate from them, and that a man so extended could meet the immortals of the eastern isles. Another claimed contact with the spirits and was married to a princess and loaded with seals of office before being executed when his methods produced nothing. Expeditions were sent out to sea to find Penglai. None returned with anything.
Alongside the search ran a genuine reconstruction of state religion. The cult of Taiyi, the Grand Unity, was installed at a new altar complex as the supreme object of imperial sacrifice, the ancestral and seasonal rites were reordered, and in 104 BCE the calendar was reformed. In 110 BCE the emperor went to Mount Tai and performed the feng and shan, sacrifices to Heaven on the summit and to Earth at its foot, which were held to be the prerogative of a ruler whose reign had been validated by peace and good omen. Nobody at court could say how the rites had been carried out in antiquity, and the ceremony was reconstructed from disputed scholarship, with the emperor performing part of it alone.
The two projects were not felt to be in tension at the time. Both belong to a single account of the world in which correct ritual, correct government and the order of nature are the same subject.