Word: angeli
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Near the end of his reign in 1722, the Chinese Emperor K'ang-hsi again turned to his copy of the I Ching. Nothing he found under the entry for "Retreat" seemed to apply to rulers. "There is no place for rulers to rest," he told his followers in a valedictory address. "Bowing down in service and wearing oneself out," he concluded, "indeed applies to this situation...
...what a way to go. For 61 years K'ang-hsi ruled China, an area larger than Peter the Great's Russia. To 150 million Chinese, this Manchu monarch was lawgiver, supreme judge, jury, protector and executioner, and one of the busiest executives in history. He supervised a vast civil service meritocracy laid down on Confucian principles that recognized society as a hierarchy of intelligence over ignorance. Like Confucius, K'ang-hsi viewed statecraft as applied knowledge in the service of the governed, and he worried about his people before they worried about themselves...
...addition to running the world's largest country and fathering 56 children with 30 consorts, K'ang-hsi found time to write the equivalent of 16,000 Western printed pages. Official documents, letters, memoranda, verse and private thoughts were collected as the Venerable Record. In Emperor of China, Jonathan Spence, professor of Chinese history at Yale, has pruned and selected this record. In the tradition of Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, he has created what he calls an "autobiographical biography." But it is more than that. From the Emperor's resplendent portrait on the dust...
...eminent connoisseur of Chinese art Dr. Sherman Lee. Entitled The Colors of Ink, it is a selection of classical Chinese black-to-white paintings on silk and paper lent from Cleveland's collection and dating from the 10th century, when the colored paintings of the T'ang dynasty were superseded by a new monochromatic style, to the 18th century. One could not hope for a more succinct introduction to what one of the artists represented on the walls, Tung Chi'i-ch'ang (1555-1636), rhapsodically called "the sheer marvels of brush and ink" wrought...
...becoming a common whore in the house of a ruthless madam. Thereafter Kieu is ravaged, reviled and degraded by a host of villainous men and women. At last, after a rebel warrior who helped her obtain revenge is killed, Kieu throws herself into the Ch'ien-t'ang River. She is rescued by a Buddhist nun and finds peace in the contemplative life-only to be reunited unexpectedly with her family and her first love, a young nobleman named Kim Trong, whom she weds on condition that the marriage never be consummated...