Ming China Quotes

In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo.

Dreamt I stood in a china shop so crowded from floor to far-off ceiling with shelves of porcelain antiques, etc. that moving a muscle would cause several to fall and smash to bits. Exactly what happened but instead of a crashing noise, an august chord rang out, half cello, half celeste, D major (?), held for four beats. My wrist knocked a Ming vase affair off its pedestal-E flat. Whole string section, glorious, transcendant, angels wept. Deliberately now, smashed a figurine of an ox for the next note, then a milkmaid, then Saturday's Child-orgy of shrapnel filled the air, divine harmonies my head.

She has observed, with pleasure, the very fine china of which the establishment boasts: Meissen’s Ming Dragon, sinuous as arteries, persimmon bright against gilt-edged bone white. She looks forward to her own pot, anticipates the dark, smoky, malty path her chosen tea will pick between the notes of candied rose, delicate bergamot, champagne and muscat and violet.

In reaching a decision on that matter, we must first be clear about certain rules of war. Rule 1, on page I of the book of war, is: "Do not march on Moscow". Various people have tried it, Napoleon and Hitler, and it is no good. That is the first rule. I do not know whether your Lordships will know Rule 2 of war. It is: "Do not go fighting with your land armies in China". It is a vast country, with no clearly defined objectives, and an army fighting there would be engulfed by what is known as the Ming Bing, the people's insurgents.

For the fish, it is a question of being alive— they don’t worry about the depth of the water.

Startled, he tried to comfort him. But Father said slowly, "I ask myself whether I am afraid of death. I don't think I am. My life as it is now is worse. And it looks as if there is not going to be any ending. Sometimes I feel weak: I stand by Tranquillity River and think, Just one leap and I can get it over with. Then I tell myself I must not. If I die without being cleared, there will be no end of trouble for all of you… I have been thinking a lot lately. I had a hard childhood, and society was full of injustice. It was for a fair society that I joined the Communists. I've tried my best through the years. But what good has it done for the people? As for myself, why is it that in the end I have come to be the ruin of my family? People who believe in retribution say that to end badly you must have something on your conscience. I have been thinking hard about the things I've done in my life. I have given orders to execute some people…" Father went on to tell Jin-ming about the death sentences he had signed, the names and stories of the e-ba ('ferocious despots') in the land reform in Chaoyang, and the bandit chiefs in Yibin. "But these people had done so much evil that God himself would have had them killed. What, then, have I done wrong to deserve all this?" After a long pause, Father said, "If I die like this, don't believe in the Communist Party anymore.

Our textbooks were ridiculous propaganda. The first English sentence we learned was "Long live Chairman Mao!" But no one dared to explain the sentence grammatically. In Chinese the term for the optative mood, expressing a wish or desire, means 'something unreal." In 1966 a lecturer at Sichuan University had been beaten up for 'having the audacity to suggest that "Long live Chairman Mao!" was unreal!" One chapter was about a model youth hero who had drowned after jumping into a flood to save an electricity pole because the pole would be used to carry the word of Mao. With great difficulty, I managed to borrow some English language textbooks published before the Cultural Revolution from lecturers in my department and from Jin-ming, who sent me books from his university by post. These contained extracts from writers like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde, and stories from European and American history. They were a joy to read, but much of my energy went toward finding them and then trying to keep them. Whenever someone approached, I would quickly cover the books with a newspaper. This was only partly because of their 'bourgeois' content. It was also important not to appear to be studying too conscientiously, and not to arouse my fellow students' jealousy by reading something far beyond them. Although we were studying English, and were paid par fly for our propaganda value by the government to do this, we must not be seen to be too devoted to our subject: that was considered being 'white and expert." In the mad logic of the day, being good at one's profession ('expert') was automatically equated with being politically unreliable ('white').

Hong Kong’s second richest man Ming Ka-Ching,

Se houve um momento fatal no destino da Rota da Seda, talvez não tenha sido a tomada de Constantinopla, nem o enclausuramento da China pelos Ming, nem o desembarque de Colombo, mas sim o dia, algures no século X, em que um chinês desconhecido descobriu a bússola marítima.

Much of Chinese society still expected its women to hold themselves in a sedate manner, lower their eyelids in response to men's stares, and restrict their smile to a faint curve of the lips which did not expose their teeth. They were not meant to use hand gestures at all. If they contravened any of these canons of behavior they would be considered 'flirtatious." Under Mao, flirting with./bre/gners was an unspeakable crime. I was furious at the innuendo against me. It had been my Communist parents who had given me a liberal upbringing. They had regarded the restrictions on women as precisely the sort of thing a Communist revolution should put an end to. But now oppression of women joined hands with political repression, and served resentment and petty jealousy. One day, a Pakistani ship arrived. The Pakistani military attache came down from Peking. Long ordered us all to spring-clean the club from top to bottom, and laid on a banquet, for which he asked me to be his interpreter, which made some of the other students extremely envious. A few days later the Pakistanis gave a farewell dinner on their ship, and I was invited. The military attache had been to Sichuan, and they had prepared a special Sichuan dish for me. Long was delighted by the invitation, as was I. But despite a personal appeal from the captain and even a threat from Long to bar future students, my teachers said that no one was allowed on board a foreign ship. "Who would take the responsibility if someone sailed away on the ship?" they asked. I was told to say I was busy that evening. As far as I knew, I was turning down the only chance I would ever have of a trip out to sea, a foreign meal, a proper conversation in English, and an experience of the outside world. Even so, I could not silence the whispers. Ming asked pointedly, "Why do foreigners like her so much?" as though there was something suspicious in that. The report filed on me at the end of the trip said my behavior was 'politically dubious." In this lovely port, with its sunshine, sea breezes, and coconut trees, every occasion that should have been joyous was turned into misery. I had a good friend in the group who tried to cheer me up by putting my distress into perspective. Of course, what I encountered was no more than minor unpleasantness compared with what victims of jealousy suffered in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. But the thought that this was what my life at its best would be like depressed me even more. This friend was the son of a colleague of my father's. The other students from cities were also friendly to me. It was easy to distinguish them from the students of peasant backgrounds, who provided most of the student officials.

An impressionistic map of the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn mane dipped into ink made of grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind stylite monks from hand-charred fragments of the True Cross.

Sin embargo, en los primeros años de la dinastía Ming, entre 1405 y 1433, China abordó una de las empresas navales más notables y misteriosas de toda la historia: el almirante Zheng He emprendió viaje con unas flotas compuestas por «barcos del tesoro», tecnológicamente sin precedentes, hacia lejanos destinos como Java, la India, el Cuerno de África y el estrecho de Ormuz.

On our way down, we passed a two-story villa, hidden in a thicket of Chinese parasol trees, magnolia, and pines. It looked almost like a random pile of stones against the background of the rocks. It struck me as an unusually lovely place, and I snapped my last shot. Suddenly a man materialized out of nowhere and asked me in a low but commanding voice to hand over my camera. He wore civilian clothes, but I noticed he had a pistol. He opened the camera and exposed my entire roll of film. Then he disappeared, as if into the earth. Some tourists standing next to me whispered that this was one of Mao's summer villas. I felt another pang of revulsion toward Mao, not so much for his privilege, but for the hypocrisy of allowing himself luxury while telling his people that even comfort was bad for them. After we were safely out of earshot of the invisible guard, and I was bemoaning the loss of my thirty-six pictures, Jin-ming gave me a grin: "See where goggling at holy places gets you!" We left Lushan by bus. Like every bus in China, it was packed, and we had to crane our necks desperately trying to breathe. Virtually no new buses had been built since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, during which time the urban population had increased by several tens of millions. After a few minutes, we suddenly stopped. The front door was forced open, and an authoritative-looking man in plainclothes squeezed in. "Get down! Get down!" he barked. "Some American guests are coming this way. It is harmful to the prestige of our motherland for them to see all these messy heads!" We tried to crouch down, but the bus was too crowded. The man shouted, "It is the duty of everyone to safeguard the honor of our motherland! We must present an orderly and dignified appearance! Get down! Bend your knees!" Suddenly I heard Jin-ming's booming voice: "Doesn'T Chairman Mao instruct us never to bend our knees to American imperialists?" This was asking for trouble. Humor was not appreciated. The man shot a stern glance in our direction, but said nothing. He gave the bus another quick scan, and hurried off. He did not want the "American guests' to witness a scene. Any sign of discord had to be hidden from foreigners. Wherever we went as we traveled down the Yangtze we saw the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution: temples smashed, statues toppled, and old towns wrecked. Litfie evidence remained of China's ancient civilization. But the loss went even deeper than this. Not only had China destroyed most of its beautiful things, it had lost its appreciation of them, and was unable to make new ones. Except for the much-scarred but still stunning landscape, China had become an ugly country.

In 1969 my parents, my sister, my brother Jin-ming, and I were expelled from Chengdu one after another, and sent to distant parts of the Sichuan wilderness. We were among millions of urban dwellers to be exiled to the countryside. In this way, young people would not be roaming the cities with nothing to do, creating trouble out of sheer boredom, and adults like my parents would have a 'future." They were part of the old administration which had been replaced by Mao's Revolutionary Committees, and packing them off to the sticks to do hard labor was a convenient solution. According to Mao's rhetoric, we were sent to the countryside 'to be reformed." Mao advocated 'thought reform through labor' for everyone, but never explained the relationship between the two. Of course, no one asked for clarification. Merely to contemplate such a question was tantamount to treason. In reality, everyone in China knew that hard labor, particularly in the countryside, was always punishment. It was noticeable that none of Mao's henchmen, the members of the newly established Revolutionary Committees, army officers and very few of their children had to do it. The first of us to be expelled was my father. Just after New Year 1969 he was sent to Miyi County in the region of Xichang, on the eastern edge of the Himalayas, an area so remote that it is China's satellite launch base today. It lies about 300 miles from Chengdu, four days' journey by truck, as there was no railway. In ancient times, the area was used for dumping exiles, because its mountains and waters were said to be permeated with a mysterious 'evil air." In today's terms, the 'evil air' was subtropical diseases.

The oldest creatures we’ve found so far all came from the sea. Ming the clam, a so-called ocean quahog caught off the coast of Iceland in 2006, turned out to be at least five hundred and seven years old. Scientists estimated its year of birth to be 1499, a few years after Columbus made it to North America and during the time of the Ming dynasty in China. Who knows how long it could have lived if the scientists in their efforts to establish its age hadn’t also accidentally killed it.

TAWANTINSUYU In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo. The empire encompassed every imaginable type of terrain, from the rainforest of upper Amazonia to the deserts of the Peruvian coast and the twenty-thousand-foot peaks of the Andes between. “If

Many scholars argue that the voyages of Admiral Zheng He of the Chinese Ming dynasty heralded and eclipsed the European voyages of discovery. Between 1405 and 1433, Zheng led seven huge armadas from China to the far reaches of the Indian Ocean. The largest of these comprised almost 300 ships and carried close to 30,000 people.7 They visited Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and East Africa. Chinese ships anchored in Jedda, the main harbour of the Hejaz, and in Malindi, on the Kenyan coast. Columbus’ fleet of 1492 – which consisted of three small ships manned by 120 sailors – was like a trio of mosquitoes compared to Zheng He’s drove of dragons.8 Yet there was a crucial difference. Zheng He explored the oceans, and assisted pro-Chinese rulers, but he did not try to conquer or colonise the countries he visited. Moreover, the expeditions of Zheng He were not deeply rooted in Chinese politics and culture. When the ruling faction in Beijing changed during the 1430s, the new overlords abruptly terminated the operation. The great fleet was dismantled, crucial technical and geographical knowledge was lost, and no explorer of such stature and means ever set out again from a Chinese port. Chinese rulers in the coming centuries, like most Chinese rulers in previous centuries, restricted their interests and ambitions to the Middle Kingdom’s immediate environs. The Zheng He expeditions prove that Europe did not enjoy an outstanding technological edge. What made Europeans exceptional was their unparalleled and insatiable ambition to explore and conquer. Although they might have had the ability, the Romans never attempted to conquer India or Scandinavia, the Persians never attempted to conquer Madagascar or Spain, and the Chinese never attempted to conquer Indonesia or Africa. Most Chinese rulers left even nearby Japan to its own devices. There was nothing peculiar about that. The oddity is that early modern Europeans caught a fever that drove them to sail to distant and completely unknown lands full of alien cultures, take one step on to their beaches, and immediately declare, ‘I claim all these territories for my king!

The [Tiananmen] Gate was built during the Ming Dynasty and used by Emperors for making public appearances and proclamations. The Gate, like Tiananmen Square, has always been a major point of focus in the political history of China. If you climb up to the balcony, you can stand on the spot from which, on October 1, 1949, Chairman Mao proclamied the founding of the People's Republic of China. The spot is clearly marked, and there is an exhibition of photographs of the event clustered around it. The view across the immensity of Tiananmen Square here is extraordinary. It is like looking across a plain from the side of a mountain. In political terms the view is more astounding yet, encompassing as it does a nation that comprises almost one-quarter of the population of this planet. All of the history of China is symbolically focused here, at this very point, and it is hard, as you stand there, not to be transfixed by the power of it. It is hard, also, not to be profoundly moved by the vision of the peasant from Shaoshan who seized that power in the name of the people and whom the people still revere, in spite of the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution, as the father of their nation. And while we were standing on this spot, the spot where Mao stood when he proclaimed the founding of the Peoples Republic of China, the music we were having played at us by the public address system was first "Viva España", and then the "Theme from Hawaii Five-O." It was hard to avoid the feeling that somebody, somewhere, was missing the point. I couldn't even be sure it wasn't me.

Third and most radically, it is not even historically or geographically or culturally predetermined that Europeans should have been the ones colonizing the world. It could have been the Chinese or even the Incas. Of course, such an outcome is impossible when we look at the world from the vantage point of the fifteenth century, by which time Western Europe had pulled ahead of the Americas, and China had already turned inward. But Western Europe of the fifteenth century was itself an outcome of a contingent process of institutional drift punctuated by critical junctures, and nothing about it was inevitable. Western European powers could not have surged ahead and conquered the world without several historic turning points. These included the specific path that feudalism took, replacing slavery and weakening the power of monarchs on the way; the fact that the centuries following the turn of the first millennium in Europe witnessed the development of independent and commercially autonomous cities; the fact that European monarchs were not as threatened by, and consequently did not try to discourage, overseas trade as the Chinese emperors did during the Ming dynasty; and the arrival of the Black Death, which shook up the foundations of the feudal order. If these events had transpired differently, we could be living in a very different world today, one in which Peru might be richer than Western Europe or the United States.

Third and most radically, it is not even historically or geographically or culturally predetermined that Europeans should have been the ones colonizing the world. It could have been the Chinese or even the Incas. Of course, such an outcome is impossible when we look at the world from the vantage point of the fifteenth century, by which time Western Europe had pulled ahead of the Americas, and China had already turned inward. But Western Europe of the fifteenth century was itself an outcome of a contingent process of institutional drift punctuated by critical junctures, and nothing about it was inevitable. Western European powers could not have surged ahead and conquered the world without several historic turning points. These included the specific path that feudalism took, replacing slavery and weakening the power of monarchs on the way; the fact that the centuries following the turn of the first millennium in Europe witnessed the development of independent and commercially autonomous cities; the fact that European monarchs were not as threatened by, and consequently did not try to discourage, overseas trade as the Chinese emperors did during the Ming dynasty; and the arrival of the Black Death, which shook up the foundations of the feudal order. If these events[…]

In our age there is no literature, but in the village alleys there are real poems!

America’s battery team was largely foreign born. There was the occasional American-born battery guy—the families of most of the researchers on Thackeray’s small team had been in the United States for generations, as had Chamberlain’s. But Thackeray himself was born in Pretoria. Chamberlain’s deputy, Tony Burrell, was from Palmerston North, on New Zealand’s North Island. Chamberlain’s immediate boss, Emilio Bunel, was Chilean. The same was true across the American battery brain trust: though John Goodenough grew up in Connecticut, Stanford’s Yi Cui was born in China, Berkeley’s Venkat Srinivasan in India, and MIT’s Yet-Ming Chiang in Taiwan. In the industry, not just Sujeet Kumar and Atul Kapadia but almost their entire team of scientists was born in India. Moroccan-born Khalil Amine unapologetically hired only foreigners. His group included not a single American-born researcher.

(O-yo-mei) won a splendid victory over the rebel army which threatened the throne of the Ming dynasty. During that warfare Wang was giving a course of lectures to a number of students at the headquarters of the army, of which he was the Commander-in-chief. At the very outset of the battle a messenger brought him the news of defeat of the foremost ranks. All the students were terror-stricken and grew pale at the unfortunate tidings, but the teacher was not a whit disturbed by it. Some time after another messenger brought in the news of complete rout of the enemy. All the students, enraptured, stood up and cheered, but he was as cool as before, and did not break off lecturing. Thus the practiser of Zen has so perfect control over his heart that he can keep presence of mind under an impending danger, even in the presence of death itself. [FN#240]

Malay representation of a global Ming China comes from a set of fifteenth-century Malay-language epics that offer colorful narrative representations of Chinese-Malay connections: specifically, the Hikayat Raja Raja Pasai (Chronicle of the Kings of Pasai) and

One of these days,” Ming mutters, “Jerry’s going to take a trip to China. He’ll get a whiff of the real breadth and depth of Chinese cooking, legendary dishes. That chicken wrapped in lotus leaves he’s read about. Authentic peppers from Sichuan, fresh as hell. Then he’ll leave the U.S. for good, retire to Asia, and Dad’s going to have to cough up real money for a lawyer.

The Ming dynasty in China opened relations with Japan after the Mongols were defeated,

The Chinese case, then, suggests a skeptical attitude toward the claims of both those who suggest there are vast and obvious differences between strategic cultures across states (like most who use the term), and those who suggest that symbolic strategy plays an important role in framing strategic options and excluding alternatives. The former take symbolic strategy too literally and too seriously—indeed, they do not recognize its symbolic status at all—and place far too much explanatory power on the side of a strategic language or discourse that may well be disconnected from the deeper argument structures behind policy preferences. The latter may exaggerate the constraining effects of this symbolic strategy because of their emphasis on the political instrumentality of strategic language. It may well be, of course, that the constraining effects of symbolic strategy increase in political systems where attentive publics do play at least some role in legitimating or acquiescing to the strategic choices of the political elite (i.e., in liberal democracies). But this was not the case in Ming China.

But it seems fairly evident that the operative Chinese strategic culture does not differ radically from key elements in the Western realpolitik tradition. Indeed, the Chinese case might be classified as a hard realpolitik sharing many of the same tenets about the nature of the enemy and the efficacy of violence as advocates of nuclear war-fighting on both sides in the Cold War, or late nineteenth century social Darwinian nationalists.7 While it does not represent the breadth or complexity of the realist tradition of statecraft, hard realpolitik is in essence one of the three Western traditions in international relations as identified by Martin Wight (the others being revolutionism and rationalism) (Wight 1991: 220-21). It is characterized by positions at the high end of the three dimensions that comprise the central paradigm of a strategic culture (see fig. 4.2)

(...) Meu coração é um sapo rajado, viscoso e cansado, à espera do beijo prometido capaz de transformá-lo em príncipe. Meu coração é um álbum de retratos tão antigos que suas faces mal se adivinham. Roídas de traça, amareladas de tempo, faces desfeitas, imóveis, cristalizadas em poses rígidas para o fotógrafo invisível. Este apertava os olhos quando sorria. Aquela tinha um jeito peculiar de inclinar a cabeça. Eu viro as folhas, o pó resta nos dedos, o vento sopra. Meu coração é um mendigo mais faminto da rua mais miserável. Meu coração é um ideograma desenhado a tinta lavável em papel de seda onde caiu uma gota d’água. Olhado assim, de cima, pode ser Wu Wang, a Inocência. Mas tão manchado que talvez seja Ming I, o Obscurecimento da Luz. Ou qualquer um, ou qualquer outro: indecifrável. Meu coração não tem forma, apenas som. Um noturno de Chopin (será o número 5?) em que Jim Morrison colocou uma letra falando em morte, desejo e desamparo, gravado por uma banda punk. Couro negro, prego e piano. Meu coração é um bordel gótico em cujos quartos prostituem-se ninfetas decaídas, cafetões sensuais, deusas lésbicas, anões tarados, michês baratos, centauros gays e virgens loucas de todos os sexos. Meu coração é um traço seco. Vertical, pós-moderno, coloridíssimo de neon, gravado em fundo preto. Puro artifício, definitivo. Meu coração é um entardecer de verão, numa cidadezinha à beira-mar. A brisa sopra, saiu a primeira estrela. Há moças na janela, rapazes pela praça, tules violetas sobre os montes onde o sol se p6os. A lua cheia brotou do mar. Os apaixonados suspiram. E se apaixonam ainda mais. Meu coração é um anjo de pedra de asa quebrada. Meu coração é um bar de uma única mesa, debruçado sobre a qual um único bêbado bebe um único copo de bourbon, contemplado por um único garçom. Ao fundo, Tom Waits geme um único verso arranhado. Rouco, louco. Meu coração é um sorvete colorido de todas as cores, é saboroso de todos os sabores. Quem dele provar, será feliz para sempre. Meu coração é uma sala inglesa com paredes cobertas por papel de florzinhas miúdas. Lareira acesa, poltronas fundas, macias, quadros com gramados verdes e casas pacíficas cobertas de hera. Sobre a renda branca da toalha de mesa, o chá repousa em porcelana da China. No livro aberto ao lado, alguém sublinhou um verso de Sylvia Plath: "Im too pure for you or anyone". Não há ninguém nessa sala de janelas fechadas. Meu coração é um filme noir projetado num cinema de quinta categoria. A platéia joga pipoca na tela e vaia a história cheia de clichês. Meu coração é um deserto nuclear varrido por ventos radiativos. Meu coração é um cálice de cristal puríssimo transbordante de licor de strega. Flambado, dourado. Pode-se ter visões, anunciações, pressentimentos, ver rostos e paisagens dançando nessa chama azul de ouro. Meu coração é o laboratório de um cientista louco varrido, criando sem parar Frankensteins monstruosos que sempre acabam destruindo tudo. Meu coração é uma planta carnívora morta de fome. Meu coração é uma velha carpideira portuguesa, coberta de preto, cantando um fado lento e cheia de gemidos - ai de mim! ai, ai de mim! Meu coração é um poço de mel, no centro de um jardim encantado, alimentando beija-flores que, depois de prová-lo, transformam-se magicamente em cavalos brancos alados que voam para longe, em direção à estrela Veja. Levam junto quem me ama, me levam junto também. Faquir involuntário, cascata de champanha, púrpura rosa do Cairo, sapato de sola furada, verso de Mário Quintana, vitrina vazia, navalha afiada, figo maduro, papel crepom, cão uivando pra lua, ruína, simulacro, varinha de incenso. Acesa, aceso - vasto, vivo: meu coração teu.

Hello nǐ hǎo knee how. (Think: How’s your knee, i.e., “How are you?”) Goodbye zàijiàn dzeye gee-en Thank you xiè xie syeh syeh (The second “xie” has no tone.) You’re welcome bú kè qi boo kuh chee (The “chee” has no tone.) Good morning zǎoshang hǎo dzow shahng how Please stand in line qǐng páiduì ching pie dway Too expensive taì guì le tie gway luh (Make it) cheaper piányi yìdiǎn pien yee ee dien (I; we) don’t want it búyào boo yow I want this one wǒ yào zhèige waw yow jay guh (Note: “guh” has no tone) How much (does it cost)? duóshǎo qian dwo shao chee-en Where is the bathroom? cèsuǒ zài nǎlǐ tsuh swo dz-eye nah lee Over there nàli nah lee (Note: “lee” has no tone) Please give me qǐng gěi wǒ ching gay waw Fine; OK; good; alright hǎo how Not OK; no good bùhǎo boo how I want to go ____ Wǒ yào qù waw yow chee-you (Show taxi driver the address in Chinese.) (Want) to go to ____ Wǒ yào dào qù ____ waw you dow ____ chee-you (e.g., when buying tickets at train or bus station) Police! jǐngchá! jing chah! (in case of theft or emergency) Help! Help! jiùmìng! jiùmìng! jee-oh ming! jee-oh ming! Faster! kuài yìdiǎn! kweye ee dien! Numbers one through ten: one yī ee two èr ar three sān sahn four sì szih five wǔ woo six liù leo seven qī chee eight bā bah nine jiǔ geo ten shí sure one of something yíge ee guh two of something liǎngge lee-ang guh three of something sānge sahn guh Etc.

Absolutism reigned not just in much of Europe but also in Asia, and similarly prevented industrialization during the critical juncture created by the Industrial Revolution. The Ming and Qing dynasties of China and the absolutism of the Ottoman Empire illustrate this pattern. Under the Song dynasty, between 960 and 1279, China led the world in many technological innovations. The Chinese invented clocks, the compass, gunpowder, paper and paper money, porcelain, and blast furnaces to make cast iron before Europe did. They independently developed spinning wheels and waterpower at more or less the same time that these emerged at the other end of Eurasia. In consequence, in 1500 standards of living were probably at least as high in China as they were in Europe. For centuries China also had a centralized state with a meritocratically recruited civil service. Yet

Absolutism reigned not just in much of Europe but also in Asia, and similarly prevented industrialization during the critical juncture created by the Industrial Revolution. The Ming and Qing dynasties of China and the absolutism of the Ottoman Empire illustrate this pattern.

Two examples of irony: ...a cheap knock-off of a Chinese Ming vase…made in China. ...getting murdered in a graveyard.

Coyote Mountain too much for her, alone with pine trees up to your neck, wooden bench by the Pecos River which runs silver in the winter untold. Dust-bit dirt lonely Indians with wet brown bellies which the moon shines upon like a frosty lake, the silver show of market stalls and paintings of four pitiful horses likes of which the Spanish brought under the Mexican memory of nightfall but the old Ming china-woman on her rickety bicycle with broken straw hat with bow-legged strength,simply; the perfect depiction of the fellaheen world riddled with ancient endeavour, the old china women of the world you’ll find them so perfect in all your cities under the twinkle of stars. The would be fishermen of dawn, collected wintery downpours and sunlight situations which never beckon further than his share, meant on this earth , match stick motels which warp your loving tales of good mornings or whichever is left.

The following journal articles and books helped me to understand different aspects of traditional Chinese medicine, with an emphasis on women: “Dispersing the Foetal Toxin of the Body: Conceptions of Smallpox Aetiology in Pre-modern China” and “Variolation” by Chia-feng Chang; A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665 by Charlotte Furth; Thinking with Cases edited by Charlotte Furth, Judith T. Zeitlin, and Ping-chen Hsiung; The Web That Has No Weaver by Ted J. Kaptchuk; The Expressiveness of Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine by Shigehisa Kuriyama; “Women Practicing Medicine in Premodern China” by Angela Ki Che Leung, who also served as editor of Medicine for Women in Imperial China; Oriental Materia Medica by Hong-yen Hsu et al.; “Between Passion and Repression: Medical Views of Demon Dreams, Demonic Fetuses, and Female Sexual Madness in Late Imperial China” by Hsiu-fen Chen; “The Leisure Life of Women in the Ming Dynasty” by Zhao Cuili; and “Female Medical Workers in Ancient China” by Jin-sheng Zheng.

As Wang Shouren, at the time an official in the Ministry of Works and later a major intellectual figure in the development of Ming interpretations of Confucianism, put it optimistically in a memorial on border security in 1500, "If I am sufficient, then the enemy becomes increasingly exhausted; if I am flourishing, then the enemy declines; if I am strong and vigorous, the enemy is increasingly bent, weak; if I am rested, then the enemy is increasingly exhausted; if I am strengthened, then the enemy is increasingly empty and weak; if I am sharp, then the enemy is increasingly dulled, and ineffectual "(Wang Shouren MCZY: 167).

As Wang Shouren, at the time an official in the Ministry of Works and later a major intellectual figure in the development of Ming interpretations of Confucianism, put it optimistically in a memorial on border security in 1500, "If I am sufficient, then the enemy becomes increasingly exhausted; if I am flourishing, then the enemy declines; if I am strong and vigorous, the enemy is increasingly bent, weak; if I am rested, then the enemy is increasingly exhausted; if I am strengthened, then the enemy is increasingly empty and weak; if I am sharp, then the enemy is increasingly dulled, and ineffectual "(Wang Shouren MCZY: 167).

What is curious about Chinese expansionism compared with the other four permanent members of the Security Council is that China’s enlargement since the Mongol invasion has been driven primarily by the non-Chinese who conquered it. China became a mega-state not by conquering others so much as by being conquered by others. What the Mongols and Manchu ruling families of the Yuan and Qing Great States wrought, the Chinese ruling families of the Ming, the Republic and the People’s Republic have chosen to perpetuate.

The Ming Dynasty controlled almost all of China and was the most advanced and powerful empire in the world. Like European empires, it was family-controlled with an emperor who had the “mandate of heaven.” The emperor oversaw a bureaucracy that was run and protected by ministers and military leaders who worked in symbiotic—though sometimes contentious—relationships with landowning noble families who oversaw peasant workers. In 1500 the Ming Dynasty was approaching its peak and was leaps and bounds ahead of Europe in wealth, technology, and power. It had enormous cultural and political influence all over East Asia and Japan.

China’s Ming Dynasty had its own version of the Age of Exploration but abandoned it. Starting in the early 1400s, Ming Dynasty Emperor Yongle empowered his most trusted admiral, Zheng He, to lead seven major naval expeditions—“treasure voyages”—around the world. Though not colonizing expeditions (and historians debate the extent to which they were commercial), these naval missions helped project China’s power abroad. Yongle’s navy was the largest and most sophisticated in the world, featuring larger and better-constructed ships than any country in Europe would produce for at least a century.

The Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) came to power when the neighboring Manchu people capitalized on instability and rebellions in Ming China to challenge it.

Wang Xing embodied a philosophy of conquest tracing back to the fourteenth-century emperor Zhu Yuanzhang, the leader of a rebel army who outlasted dozens of competing warlords to found the Ming Dynasty: “Build high walls, store up grain, and bide your time before claiming the throne.” For Wang Xing, venture funding was his grain, a superior product was his wall, and a billion-dollar market would be his throne.

By the time Zhu Yuanzhang (Emperor Hongwu, r. 1368–98) vanquished the last of his rivals and founded the Ming dynasty in 1368, millions had died and the economy was in ruins. Hongwu was determined to eradicate what he regarded as the pernicious influence of Mongol customs and to restore the institutions and values of the agrarian society enshrined in the Confucian Classics.

Having reviewed diverse theories and hypotheses on the waning of the Age of Enlightenment in Central Asia, it is now time to step back and raise a larger question: does it really require an explanation? The assumption behind our search for causes is that if one or another factor had not come into play, the movement of thought would have continued. But that great period of intense cerebration, that age of inquiry and innovation, had lasted for more than four centuries. If more information on the centuries preceding the Arab invasion had survived, we might confidently extend that period of flowering even further back in time. Even without this addition, the Age of Enlightenment was five times longer than the lifetime of Periclean Athens; a century longer than the entire history of the intellectual center of Alexandria from its foundation to the destruction of its library; only slightly shorter than the entire life span of the Roman Republic; longer than the Ming or Qing dynasties in China and the same length as the Han; about the same length as the history of Japan from the founding of the Tokugawa dynasty to the present; and of England from the age of Shakespeare to our own day. As they say in the theater world, it had a long run. It is well and good to speak of causes of the decline of the passion for inquiry and innovation, or of some supposed exhaustion of creative energies. But just as we feel little need to discover the cause of a nonagenarian’s death, we need not inquire too urgently into the cause of the waning of this remarkable age. Of course, the question of why the region as a whole remained in a state of backwardness from the end of the Age of Enlightenment down to recent times is vitally important, but it involves many factors besides those that came into play in the intellectual decline. It should form the subject of another book.

Alexander, Gog, and Magog. The emergence of the Wall as an international symbol had resulted from many of those same forces that had elsewhere led to the colonization of the Americas. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Wall drew the attention of Jesuit missionaries to China. The Jesuits were never especially successful at converting the Chinese to Christianity. However, they dazzled the imperial court with novelties of Western manufacture—pumps, clocks, sextants, telescopes, cannons, even steam-powered automobiles—and in turn the Jesuits were dazzled by the Great Wall of the Ming. To Father Verbiest

1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo.

The most noteworthy knock-Shaq-on-his-rear addition took place on June 26, 2002, when the Houston Rockets used the first pick in the NBA draft to select Yao Ming, the 7-foot-6, 310-pound center who had recently averaged 38.9 points and 20.2 rebounds per game in the playoffs with the Shanghai Sharks of the Chinese Basketball Association. Though he was just 21 and unfamiliar with high-caliber competition, Yao’s arrival was considered a direct challenge to O’Neal’s reign as the NBA’s mightiest big man. Sure, Shaq was tall. But he wasn’t this tall. Within weeks, a song titled simply “Yao Ming” was being played on Houston radio stations, and Steve Francis, the Rockets’ superstar guard, was being introduced to audiences as “Yao Ming’s teammate.” There was talk—only half in jest—of a Ming dynasty. Put simply, the NBA’s 28 other franchises were doing their all to shove the Lakers off their perch. If that meant copying elements of the triangle offense (as many teams attempted to do), so be it. If that meant adding Mutombo or Clark, so be it. If that meant importing China’s greatest center, so be it. And if that meant throwing punches—well, let’s go.

Two Weeks Big Ticket Tour After four days satiating yourself on Běijīng’s mandatory highlights – the Forbidden City, Tiān’ānmén Square, the Summer Palace, the Great Wall and the city’s charming hútòng (alleyways) – hop on the overnight high-speed Z class sleeper across north China from Běijīng West to Xī’ān to inspect the famed Terracotta Warriors, walk around the city’s formidable Ming dynasty walls and climb the granite peaks of Taoist Huà Shān. Climb aboard the late-afternoon high-speed Z class sleeper to pulsating Shànghǎi, which pulls into town before breakfast. After three days sightseeing, museum-going, shopping and sizing up the sizzling skyscrapers of Pǔdōng, detour for a day to the former southern Song dynasty capital of Hángzhōu, before flying from either Hángzhōu or Shànghǎi to Guìlín for some of China’s most serene and ageless panoramas, the breathtaking karst landscapes of Yángshuò.

Guo Ming smiled wryly. “Publicly rescue the Americans? Put a Chinese astronaut on Mars? Have the world see China as equal to the US in space? The State Council would sell their own mothers for that.