Word: cathay
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...world, excepting the Incarnation and Death of Him who created it." That sounds like Richard Nixon's blurt on the Apollo 11 moon landing, but it was written in the 16th century by a Spaniard named Lopez de Gomara, after men knew Christopher Columbus had found not Cathay but a wholly new "fourth part of the earth." For centuries, fabled islands populated by demigods, monsters or Arcadians had been part of the imagery of European legend, and the discovery of the South American Indian-lolling in a hammock, innocent of toil and tyranny, naked except for a bright girdle...
...pulled up at the elegant Cathay Hotel, where the eighth-floor dining room overlooking the Whangpoo River used to be famous for its gin gimlets and beef Stroganoff-only now it was the Peace Hotel, and the ornate front entrance had been sealed off. A great tapestry of Yenan and a red and gold Mao-thought dominated the lobby. The dim lighting, bare walls and slipcovers on the old plush furniture gave the Cathay-Peace the half-open look of a lavish summer resort trying to squeak through the winter. The reception desk, once manned by British-accented Chinese concierges...
...tell Americans about America. But the English, thank God, have it. In this 13-part series, a coproduction by the BBC and TIME-LIFE Films, they are using it to show a country that, even to Americans, sometimes seems as foreign and fascinating as Marco Polo's Cathay...
...infants annually during the 1930s have gone. But so have the sin and the aura of intrigue and the giddy opulence. The once-imposing semicircle of banks and commercial houses along the Hwang Pu River only dimly reflects the day when Western tycoons lounged in the lobby of the Cathay (now Peace) Hotel or wheeled around in bulletproof cars...
...beneath the dense set-'em-right facts, the book is a hymn to the life of the mariner. Morison has gathered together into a 1,000-year epic the sagas of all those serendipitous seamen who set sail with visions of Cathay or a Northwest Passage-or at least a new fishing ground-and instead bumped into places like Greenland, Labrador and finally the rest of North America. The familiar names are here: Leif Ericsson, discovering his mysterious Vinland around 1000 (Morison would like to believe it was Newfoundland); John Cabot, who sought a short cut to the Indies...