Word: emperor
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Sometimes over English cherry brandy and again over Chinese tea, the mandarins insisted, the ambassador resisted. Amherst offered to kneel on one knee. Not enough. He would even kiss the Emperor's hand, as was the custom in England. The mandarins shook their heads in horror over what they plainly thought a disgusting custom...
...struck the Occidentals as an Oriental trick that would somehow signify their subservience. Amherst offered to do so if a mandarin of equal rank would genuflect before a portrait of the British sovereign. "Inadmissible!" snapped the Chinese. Amherst played the idea a bit further. He would kowtow to the Emperor if it were guaranteed that any Chinese ambassador in London would make similar obeisance to the English throne. "Impossible!" snorted the mandarins...
...garlic on a much-used blanket"), ridiculed the native opera ("the instrumental music, from its resemblance to the bagpipes, might be tolerated by Scotchmen; to others it was detestable"). Then, as they neared the walls of Peking, the troubled mandarins agreed that the troublesome ambassador might kneel before the Emperor on one knee and bow three times, repeating this homage thrice. The Canton trade, the British told themselves, was not worth any more appeasement...
...night his mission reached the capital, tired and travel-stained, the ambassador received an abrupt summons from Emperor Chia Ch'ing: appear immediately at the imperial residence. Amherst stood on his dignity and refused, pleading first fatigue, then illness. The Emperor promptly sent a court physician who reported back that the Briton was malingering...
...princess' hand in the end, Turandot hardly offers much opportunity for dramatic movement on the stage. In the City Center production, Stage Director Vladimir Rosing and Designer H. A. Condell had succeeded in getting up some colorful pageantry; three Gilbert & Sullivan types named Ping, Pang anu Pong, the emperor's ministers, did their best to give the opera some comic relief; and Soprano Martinis sang her stony and stolid role with a voice that was as strong, hard and cold as a wire cable. The chill was hardly her fault: singing her first Turandot, she found the part...