“
The cult of Mao and the cult of Lei Feng were two faces of the same coin: one was the cult of personality; the other, its essential corollary, was the cult of impersonality
”
”
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
“
You, my child, will marry well. More than once." (...) The lady retrieved the cards and shuffled them back together into one stack in an attitude of dismissal.
Taking this as a sign her fortune was complete, Preshea stood. Looking particularly pleased with life, she passed over a few coins and gave Madame Spetuna a nice curtsy.
Mademoiselle Geraldine was fanning herself. "Oh, dear, oh, dear, Miss Buss. Let us hope it is widowhood and not" - she whispered the next word - "divorce that leads to your multiple marriages."
Preshea sat and sipped from a china cup. "I shouldn't worry, Headmistress. I am tolerably certain it will be widowhood.
”
”
Gail Carriger (Curtsies & Conspiracies (Finishing School, #2))
“
If you flip a coin three times and it lands on heads each time, it’s probably chance. If you flip it a hundred times and it lands on heads each time, you can be pretty sure the coin has heads on both sides. That’s the concept behind statistical significance—it’s the odds that the correlation (or other finding) is real, that it isn’t just random chance.
”
”
T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health)
“
I had, of course, witnessed hundreds of people in a casino before, mindlessly dropping coins into slot machines. They don't play for money in America. It's true. The big payout is incidental to most gamblers. It's the numbness they're after. Not so in China. No one had that look of glazed stupor often found in American casinos.
”
”
J. Maarten Troost (Lost on Planet China)
“
I found myself possessed of only a single coin—one half-crown piece. Still I had hitherto had no lack, and I continued in prayer.
”
”
James Hudson Taylor (The Autobiography of Hudson Taylor: Missionary to China (Illustrated))
“
When sovereignty first expands to become the general organizing principle of a society, it is by turning violence into kinship. The early, spectacular phase of mass killing in both China and Egypt, whatever else it may be doing, appears to be intended to lay the foundations of what Max Weber referred to as a ‘patrimonial system’: that is, one in which all the kings’ subjects are imagined as members of the royal household, at least to the degree that they are all working to care for the king. Turning erstwhile strangers into part of the royal household, or denying them their own ancestors, are thereby ultimately two sides of the same coin. Or to put things another way, a ritual designed to produce kinship becomes a method of producing kingship.
”
”
David Graeber (The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity)
“
Mao relied on propaganda and education—“Thought Reform,” as he called it, which became known colloquially as xinao, or “mind-cleansing.” (In 1950, a CIA officer who learned of it coined the term brainwashing.)
”
”
Evan Osnos (Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China)
“
In 1885, an American economist tried to reckon the extraordinary transformation wrought by what was now 200,000 miles of railroad, more than in all of Europe. It was possible to move one ton of freight one mile for less than seven-tenths of one cent, “a sum so small,” he wrote, “that outside of China it would be difficult to find a coin of equivalent value to give a boy as a reward for carrying an ounce package across a street.
”
”
Jill Lepore (These Truths: A History of the United States)
“
The languages of regimes like Russia and China, for their part, employ terms that bear the pejorative sense of “snitch” and “traitor.” It would take the existence of a strong free press in those societies to imbue those words with a more positive coloration, or to coin new ones that would frame disclosure not as a betrayal but as an honorable duty.
”
”
Edward Snowden (Permanent Record)
“
Despite its origins as a cultural item from Tang China enjoyed by only a handful of people, Japanese tea spread gradually but surely to become an important part of the historical record. Several centuries later, by the early 1400s, many commoners were enjoying tea, cultivation was more intensive, the market came to the fore as a means of exchanging the beverage, and most notably, the tea plant originally imported from China lost its exotic appeal and became nativized to Japan. City folk would have been familiar with the cries of street tea peddlers. “A bowl for a coin (ippuku issen)!” they would shout, hoping to entice potential customers to try their particular concoctions. Tea went on to become a daily fact of life for all the inhabitants of the archipelago. For this reason, it serves as a lens through which to view the development of Japanese society over the ages.
”
”
William Wayne Farris (A Bowl for a Coin: A Commodity History of Japanese Tea)
“
This is how we tend to learn about world history: as discrete civilizations that developed on their own over time. Now imagine a different kind of museum, one organized solely by era. You could stroll through a gallery, for example, and see a Roman silver denarius coin, a bronze coin from China’s Han dynasty, and a punch-marked coin from India’s Mauryan Empire. You would see right away that three major civilizations were going through remarkably similar changes at roughly the same time, despite the vast distance between them: each had become an empire, and each was running an economy based upon coin currency.
”
”
Michael Puett (The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life)
“
her American son became the forefather of many Icelanders. Their American adventure did not change the world – the colonists were too few and the European prizes were too rich. Yet, as a newly discovered Milanese document reveals, knowledge of the continent’s existence was passed down by Nordic sailors.[*16] A Danish king Harthacnut still ruled England, recognizing as his heir the Aethling Edward, son of Aethelred, later celebrated for saintly piety as the Confessor. But on 8 June 1042 Harthacnut, attending a wedding in London, raised a toast to the bride and ‘suddenly fell to the earth with an awful convulsion’. The saintly Edward probably poisoned him. Edward was supported by the prince blinder, mass-scalper and kingmaker Godwin of Wessex, who, married to Canute’s sister-in-law, had helped destroy his father and killed at least one brother. But now they soothed these crimes with marriage: Edward married Godwin’s daughter Edith and raised his son Harold to earl. When Godwin died, Harold, half Anglo-Saxon, half Dane, succeeded as the first potentate of the kingdom, earl of Wessex. Since Edward had no children, who would inherit England? The island was on the edge of Europe, but Canute’s Roman trip showed how this Scando-Britannic empire was now linked by Mediterranean trade routes to Asia. Two coins from a resurgent China have been found in Edward’s England, while in Egypt the Mad Caliph, al-Hakim, had gone much further, contacting the new Chinese emperor.
”
”
Simon Sebag Montefiore (The World: A Family History of Humanity)
“
The Emperor [Wudi,156 BC – 87 BC] orders a white metallic currency of a mixture of silver and tin, considering that in heaven there is othing superior to the dragon, and on earth nothing superior to the horse, and among men nothing superior to the tortoise ; there there shall be three sorts of metallic coins"
Of the first : "It shall have a value of 8 Tales, make it round ; its device shall be a dragon; its name shall be 'T'suan (Regulator), and its value, 3000 coins.
Of the second : "make it different, and smaller in comparison to the first in thickness, and of a square form, its device shall be a horse ; its value : 500 coins."
Of the third : "Make it still smaller in size, and in weight, four Taels." "Let is be of oblong form, its device shall be a tortoise, and its value : 300 coins:
”
”
John S. Dye
“
It is hard to believe, but the phrase ‘workshop of the world’ was originally coined for Britain, which today, according to Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, has ‘no industry’. Having successfully launched the Industrial Revolution before other countries, Britain became such a dominant industrial power by the mid nineteenth century that it felt confident enough to completely liberalize its trade (see Thing 7). In 1860, it produced 20 per cent of world manufacturing output. In 1870, it accounted for 46 per cent of world trade in manufactured goods. The current Chinese share in world exports is only around 17 per cent (as of 2007), even though ‘everything’ seems to be made in China, so you can imagine the extent of British dominance then.
”
”
Ha-Joon Chang (23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism)
“
This [sand-dollar hunting] had become one of our rituals together, and though she would search for other varieties of shells when I was out of town or unable to see her, she would wait until I appeared on her front porch before setting off to extract these mute delicate coins from their settings in the sand. At first, we had collected only the larger specimens, but gradually as we learned what was rare and to be truly prized, we began to gather only the smallest sand dollars for our collection. Our trophies were sometimes as small as thumbnails and as fragile as contact lenses. Annie Kate collected the tiniest relics, round and cruciform and white as bone china when dried of sea water, and placed them in a glass-and-copper cricket box in her bedroom. Often we would sit together and admire the modest splendor of our accumulation. At times it looked like the coinage of a shy, diminutive species of angel. Our quest to find the smallest sand dollar became a competition between us, and as the months passed and Annie Kate grew larger with the child, the brittle, desiccated animals we unearthed from the sand became smaller and smaller. It was all a matter of training the eye to expect less.
”
”
Pat Conroy (The Lords of Discipline)
“
the early 1330s, bubonic plague broke out in China. It spread to Europe in 1346 and was coined the Black Death due to the large lymphatic buboes that formed in one’s armpits and groin. The purulent sores turned black and then burst, spraying and infecting all around them with deadly pus.” Undertaker continued, “One-third the population of Europe and Asia died, some estimates are as high as fifty million people.” He stared at McAlister and said, softly, “Again, Tibet—untouched,
”
”
Hunt Kingsbury (Book of Cures (A Thomas McAlister Adventure 2))
“
Kushan coins bore Greek or Kharoshthi script along with images of their kings, Greek, Persian, and Hindu gods, and of the Buddha. Reliable coinage helped Kushan broker commercial exchanges between China, India, Persia, and, ultimately, Rome. Kushan became a great patron of Buddhism and promoted the dissemination of the faith through Central Asia, en route to East Asia.
”
”
James A. Millward (The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
It was Churchill who called John Foster Dulles “the only bull who brings his own china shop with him,” and who coined the progression, “dull, duller, Dulles.
”
”
William Manchester (The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965)
“
Human nature is a constant – except when it isn’t. In the future society, consciousness, the way in which people understand themselves to be people, might be very different. On the one hand, we might say that people have always fallen in love, made art, worshipped gods, fought wars and engaged in complex forms of political organisation and conflict. But our understanding of ourselves as human subjects today is profoundly different from medieval times, which, again, is profoundly different from Ancient Rome or Greece or Egypt; which, again, is profoundly different from Neolithic times… anyway, the point is, in the future, people might not share our values. Your vision of the future should reflect this and not simply reflect modern attitudes in different clothes. 6: Language shapes reality. Language changes over time. New words are coined, others fall out of use. Social and technological changes produce changes in the lexicon; styles of speaking and writing evolve, what was ‘normal’ in the eighteenth century seems obscure today – your future should reflect this, with new words, new slang, new expressions and colloquialisms, new ways of speaking and articulating. China Miéville’s Embassytown (2011) is a good example of how to do this. Building a new, tangible reality out of language will give your vision of the future a density, credibility and coherence that goes beyond the practical mechanics of story, plot and structure. Finally, be bold – the future is yours to imagine.
”
”
Dan Coxon (Writing the Future)
“
The change to the Arctic has been so rapid and sudden that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has declared “the Arctic as we’ve known it is now a thing of the past,” even coining the phrase the “New Arctic” to describe this fundamental shift.* There are currently more than nine hundred infrastructure projects in development, totaling over a trillion dollars in investment. A majority of which is being undertaken by Russia. They’ve reopened abandoned Soviet-era military installations and established a slew of new seaports across their northern coast. Even China—which has no territorial claim to the Arctic—has expanded its global infrastructure initiative, known as Belt and Road, to include projects across the Arctic Circle. China envisions creating a northern sea route that could cut travel time between Asia and Europe by a third. To this end, China is building a fleet of hardened ice-capable cargo ships and fuel carriers to traverse this future “Polar Silk Road.”* With each passing year, the stakes in the Arctic continue to climb—as does the tension. It’s estimated that a quarter of the planet’s oil and gas remains hidden there.* It is also a treasure chest of rare earth minerals (neodymium, praseodymium, terbium, and dysprosium) that are vital to the world’s renewable energy projects, including the surging production of electric vehicles. In the Russian Arctic alone, the mineral value is estimated to be upwards of two trillion U.S. dollars.* Then there are the vast new seas open to fishing, where conflicts are already arising.
”
”
James Rollins (Arkangel (Sigma Force #18))
“
In the late afternoon he was standing by a tent run by a trapper-merchant from Oregon, an Englishman named Haversham, the only man at the rendezvous in European dress, and Haversham asked, “Care for a cup of tea?” It had been a long time since McKeag had drunk tea and he said, “Don’t mind if I do.” The Englishman had two china cups and a small porcelain pot. Washing the cups with steaming water, he took down a square brown tin, opened the top carefully and placed a small portion of leaves in the pot. To McKeag they bore no visible difference from the tea leaves his mother had used, but when Haversham poured him a cup and he took his first sip, an aroma unlike any he had ever known greeted him. He sniffed it several times, then took a deep taste of the hot tea. It was better than anything he had previously tasted, better even than whiskey. What did it taste like? Well, at first it was tarry, as if the person making the tea had infused by mistake some stray ends of well-tarred rope. But it was penetrating too, and a wee bit salty, and very rich and lingering. McKeag noticed that its taste dwelled in the mouth long after that of an ordinary tea. It was a man’s tea, deep and subtle and blended in some rugged place. “What is it?” he asked. Haversham pointed to the brown canister, and McKeag said, “I can’t read.” Haversham indicated the lettering and the scene of tea-pickers in India. “Lapsang souchong,” he said. “Best tea in the world.” Impulsively McKeag asked, “You have some for sale?” “Of course. We’re the agents.” It was a tea, Haversham explained, blended in India especially for men who had known the sea. It was cured in a unique way which the makers kept secret. “But smoke and tar must obviously play a part,” he said. It came normally from India to London, but the English traders in Oregon imported theirs from China. “How long would a can like that last?” McKeag asked, cautiously again. “It’ll keep forever … with the top on.” “I mean, how many cups?” “I use it sparingly. It would last me a year.” “I’ll take two cans,” McKeag said, without asking the price. It was expensive, and as he tucked his small supply of coins back into his belt, Haversham explained, “The secret in making good lapsang souchong lies in heating the cup first. Heat it well. Then the flavor expands.” McKeag hid the canisters at the bottom of his gear, for he knew they were precious.
”
”
James A. Michener (Centennial)
“
This is MY FATHER'S House - not a bank!!!'
'What's got into Him??' 'Low blood sugar?' 'Hey Judas - get the coins!
”
”
Larry Gonick (The Cartoon History of the Universe II, Vol. 8-13: From the Springtime of China to the Fall of Rome (The Cartoon History of the Universe, #2))
“
The world Gary Henderson predicted when he coined the term “designer drugs” in 1988 is now with us. Counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl and made in Mexico now dominate the market and have replaced the sloppy Magic Bullet blender in a dealer’s kitchen and the powder fentanyl coming from China. In Los Angeles, DEA agents seized 120,000 of these pills crossing the border in 2017, and 1.2 million of them in 2020.
”
”
Sam Quinones (The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth)
“
Anand was on tour in a distant village when the shattering news of the Chinese invasion was announced. Within hours, there was an astonishing metamorphosis in the prevailing atmosphere. Except for the lone troubled voice that came from the radio, there was a numbed silence all around. Every citizen was in the grip of an indescribable mixture of anger, anguish, a sense of disappointment, and above all, a feeling of unity with every other Indian.
Just when Anand was about to leave, a lad of about ten came forward. He put his hand in his shirt pocket and produced a twenty-five paise coin. He held it out tentatively and stammered, "This is my contribution to defeat China..."
Anand accepted the coin and hugged the boy. He controlled his emotion with some difficulty.
The gesture electrified the atmosphere. For the first time faces brightened somewhat. "Why not raise a fund in the village?", said the Sarpanch.
"Yes!" interjected the villagers. "We must give and give and give until it hurts! Each a little more than he can afford to."
God! Does this country need the threat of external aggression to unite it internally? wondered Anand, as his car turned into the highway.
”
”
P.V. Narasimha Rao (The insider)
“
Socialism in Chinese style’ is in fact a phrase coined to save the face of the Chinese Communist leaders who do not have the courage to acknowledge openly that socialism has failed in China. They hope to revitalize the State-owned industries with methods of management copied from capitalist countries and to use market forces as a substitute for central planning while retaining State ownership of those industries. They want the Party-appointed managers, who are bureaucrats on fixed salaries, to achieve the same degree of expertise and commitment as the entrepreneurs of private industries in the West. They want the workers to work much harder and more competitively for bonuses and small increases in pay but reduced welfare benefits. And they hope everybody will be motivated by patriotism to achieve increased productivity and profit for the State but at the same time to remain honest and incorruptible.
”
”
Nien Cheng (Life and Death in Shanghai)
“
Law was fired, then rehired, then fired again. In an echo of what happened hundreds of years earlier in China, the Regent gave up on paper money, and on banks entirely. The government went back to gold and silver coins and took on new debts to compensate people who had lost money on Mississippi stock and paper notes.
”
”
Jacob Goldstein (Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing)
“
On January 6, 2017, the day after bitcoin hit an all-time high trading volume of $11 billion in one day and crossed the $1000-a-coin mark for the second time in its life, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) announced it was investigating bitcoin trading on Chinese exchanges.
”
”
Chris Burniske (Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond)
“
who’s universal sovereign? In 1287, after not one but two failed invasions of Japan, Kublai Khan issued a new kind of paper money. The paper still had pictures of bronze coins on it, but this time they were just pictures. Government offices refused to redeem the paper for silver or bronze; people could no longer exchange their treasure exchange vouchers for treasure. We have to imagine there was some panic. There was inflation: prices rose as money became less valuable. But then the economy stabilized. The center held. Pieces of paper that were just paper, that weren’t even pretending to be treasure vouchers or silver IOUs, still worked as money. This is the radical experiment that Marco Polo witnessed: money as almost pure abstraction, backed by nothing. It would be like if Wile E. Coyote ran off the cliff, looked down, saw empty space below him—and didn’t fall. Partly this is a testament to the sheer power of the Mongol state: use this paper as money or I’ll kill you. But partly, after three hundred years of using paper money, people in China had figured out that paper money worked not because it was backed by silver or bronze, but because everybody agreed paper could be money.
”
”
Jacob Goldstein (Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing)
“
young adults in China who have spent so much play money, or “QQ coins,” on magical swords and other powerful game objects that the People’s Bank of China intervened to prevent the devaluation of the yuan, China’s real-world currency.2
”
”
Jane McGonigal (Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World)