Word: emperor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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China's Manchu Emperor Ch'ien-lung, 64, who likes to spend his afternoons writing poetry and practicing calligraphy, has just won another smashing victory on the battlefield. After five years of struggle against rebellious tribes in the mountains of Szechwan, the Emperor's troops laid siege to the rebels' main stone fortress, constructed cannons on the spot and in March forced it to surrender. Ch'ien-lung's armies, which earlier defeated the Mongolians and Tibetans, have by now expanded his empire by some 600,000 square miles, notably in Sinkiang. He thus...
...years, the Manchu ruler is engaged in an enormous program of cultural improvements. Some 15,000 calligraphers have been engaged to make handwritten copies of 10,000 books for the nation's half-dozen main libraries. (No books critical of the Manchus are permitted, however.) The Emperor is also subsidizing hundreds of poets and painters to exalt Chinese achievements...
...this military and cultural display, the Emperor appears to be ignoring a future problem. Partly because of the Manchus' imposition of political stability, and partly because such newly introduced American foods as maize and peanuts can be grown on marginal lands, China's population is virtually exploding. The increase in the 132 years since the founding of the dynasty: from 100 million to nearly 300 million. Just to the south of Ch'ien-lung's empire, a new civil war is raging among the Vietnamese. Chief victors so far: the three Tay Son brothers, Nhac...
With shirtsleeves rolled up and rubber boots protecting his feet, the grey-haired man bent like a peasant to the task of planting rice shoots in the flooded paddy. That might seem plebeian labor for an emperor, but Hirohito of Japan, 75, has always shown deep sympathy for the farming millions of his subjects, and made it a royal duty to take a personal part in opening the rice-planting season. Come fall, the monarch will return to the same paddy in the imperial palace compound and harvest a crop of about 300 lbs., part of it destined...
...quipped the actor, adding that his watery scene was "not long enough for me to catch a cold." The movie, which features Olivia Hussey as the Virgin Mary, Robert Powell as Christ, and James Mason as Joseph of Arimathea, is due on television next spring. Ustinov, who played the emperor Nero in the 1951 film Quo Vadis, insists he is happy in the role of a heavy. "In religious films," he notes, "the best parts go to members of the opposition...