Word: emperor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...EMPEROR OF CHINA...
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...
...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...
...ancient civilization that had occasionally seen Emperors step aside for men they considered worthier than themselves, this Emperor strove to be come a model of excellence. "All the Ancients used to say that the Emperor should concern himself with general principles, but need not deal with the smaller details," he wrote. K'ang-hsi dis agreed: "Failure to attend to details will end up endangering your greater vir tues." It is still excellent advice, for pipe fitters as well as Presidents with an imperial bent...
...Lies Here? (Putnam; $6.95), Author Thomas G. Wheeler picks bones of a more literal sort. His quite confident contention is that Napoleon's tomb at the Invalides never contained the body of the Emperor. The corpse reburied there in 1840 was a look-alike named Eugène Robeaud. This impostor, an infantryman chosen by Napoleon's secret police to stand in for the Emperor at various ceremonial and public functions, was eventually smuggled onto St. Helena in 1818 and substituted for the exiled Napoleon as a British prisoner. According to Wheeler, Robeaud soon died of arsenic poisoning...