Word: emperor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Yang Kwei Fei (Daiei; Buena Vista). Once upon a time, a thousand years ago. there lived a lonely emperor in old Cathay. His wife had died in the bloom of her youth, and he was inconsolable. In the morning when his ministers brought him the leading questions of the day, in the evening when they brought him the fairest maidens of the realm, the emperor only sighed and sent them away. Only in his music could he find surcease, and with his lute he whiled the sorrowing hours away. Aha. thought an ambitious general, if I can find the woman...
...general was discussing the problem with a political associate, whose three proud and beautiful cousins had been rejected by the emperor. All at once he found himself staring at a kitchen wench who was tending the fire. He seemed to detect under the soot a deli cate beauty. "But who is this girl?" he demanded excitedly of his host. "Why, nobody at all," the other replied. "She is only a little serving girl, fresh up from the country." The general seized the frightened child and wiped the soot off her face. "I have found a pearl!" he cried...
Soon the girl, who was given the name of Yang Kwei Fei, was dressed in robes of finest silk, and sent to wait upon the emperor where he took his tea among the flowering plums. He took up his lute and made a hymn to the budding grove. The maiden, listening, was pierced to the heart by his music. She thought, "He must be seeking sincerity." That night she was sent to wait upon the emperor in his bedchamber. When he came to bed and saw her fresh and tender as a flowering branch, he staggered back. "Who sent...
...years that followed, Yang Kwei Fei and the emperor lived together in the light of love; but all the while, though neither of them knew it, the light cast a lengthening shadow across the land. In gratitude to his favorite, the emperor had made her former master his prime minister, and that rapacious man had made the name of Yang a byword and a hissing in every corner of the empire. At last there was a revolution. The emperor's own guard put the tyrant to death, and demanded the life of Yang Kwei Fei as well. The emperor...
...Lancet touched off another major debate by charging that London Surgeon Sir Henry Thompson had caused the death of exiled Emperor Napoleon III by operating on him for a bladder stone by lithotrity (penetration into the urethra by a pair of forceps) instead of lithotomy (incision into the bladder...