That was the year when Fatimid invaders began to build a grand enclosure to house their new mosques and palaces – a private city known to its residents as al-Qahera, and eventually to the world as Cairo.
It dates back to the mid-18th century, and there are Dutch palaces, 15th-century Portuguese churches and ornate Indian temples to explore.
Some would have you believe that Yanukovych was a democratic, pro-Russian president driven out by western spies – yet he held his palaces and hunting estate via British shell companies, and his son's assets were owned through the Netherlands and Switzerland.
In the misty gloom we draw towards buildings with black-tiled roofs and red pillars, like the palaces in Seoul.
Stella Duffy, a novelist and creator of the Fun Palaces festivals, told the Guardian that the protection of copyright gave her a pension.
Like their palaces, the powers of Whitehall fan out wide and deep.
And these are the same people who a few years ago would have been staying in maharajahs' palaces in Rajasthan.
Hotel Deluxe explores the rise of these grand palaces of relaxation and servility where real life, and occasionally morality, are suspended.
The centre's commercial palaces were designed in conscious imitation of medieval Venice and Florence.
Meeting "the voice and embodiment of the jazz age, its product and its beneficiary, a popular novelist, a movie scenarist, a dweller in the gilded palaces", the reporter found instead, to his distinct hilarity, that Fitzgerald was "forecasting doom, death and damnation to his generation".
In fact, just as Mirren, the actress, has acquired the regal confidence to leave the theatre and command silence in the streets (when vexed by drummers), it has become easy to imagine her double deploring, if not a hereditary monarchy, then the lamentably few roles – outside her palaces – available to older working women.
