Word: emperor
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...service of one's prince, repeated scolding can lead only to loss of favor." And in Imperial China, favor was with-drawn with a vengeance--China's greatest historian, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, was castrated for defending a general who had fallen into the disfavor of a Han emperor. Ssu's action had been morally correct, but he had violated another, more important Confucian precept--"First and foremost," The Master had said, "be faithful to your superiors." Confucians stood by parents, princes, and emperors, right or wrong...
This ethic of blind loyalty was the fatal flaw in the Confucian tradition. A young official served at the grace of the emperor, not China, because, for him, the emperor was the very essence of China. During the Opium War--China's disastrous contact with the naked force of Western imperialism--complete alteration of battle results was common. The deceptions protected individual officers in the eyes of the emperor at the expense of the entire people--but then "the people" was only a vague concept in the Confucian tradition. The ruling hierarchy could not handle conflicts greater than relations between...
...untypical of the residual royals is the self-styled "Doktor Habsburg," recognized by a handful of monarchist followers as Emperor Otto I of Austria and King Otto II of Hungary. Scion of one of the great European dynasties -along with the Bourbons, the Windsors and Hohenzollerns-Otto von Habsburg was exiled in 1919 with his then reigning father, Emperor Charles 1 of Austria (King Charles IV of Hungary). Before the Anschluss in 1938, Hitler offered to restore Otto to his throne if he would support Nazi ideology. He refused, and during World War II, when he lived...
...over the next two decades in exchange for French products. In Japan, the government extended a royal welcome to two barnstorming Arab oil ministers, Saudi Arabia's Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani and Algeria's Belaid Abdessalam. They were granted an unusual 30-minute audience with Emperor Hirohito. Like a king granting gifts to supplicants, Yamani declared that "Japan is in the No. 1 position both to help us and to be the recipient of Saudi Arabian oil on a long term basis." Minister of International Trade and Industry Yasuhiro Nakasone, on a recent Middle East swing, closed deals...
Peking insists that its legal right to the Paracels dates back 2,000 years, to the Han dynasty. Saigon traces its claim back to the reign of Vietnamese Emperor Gia Long at the beginning of the 19th century. Whatever the legalities. Western analysts were surprised that China regarded the Paracels as important enough to warrant the use of arms, especially when Peking has been portraying itself as a peaceful member of the Asian community. Certainly neither the guano deposits nor swallows' nests nor tortoise shells nor edible sea slugs that constitute the islands' sole resources could have prompted...