Word: emperors
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...last year, a Tokyo court ordered the government to pay $170,000 to the son of the late Liu Lien-yen, a slave worker from China who escaped in July 1945 and spent the next 13 years living in the mountains of northern Hokkaido, unaware that Emperor Hirohito had surrendered...
...elusive Pere David's deer, an anatomical cocktail of an animal with backward-facing horns, a long, thick camel neck and a donkey's tail. For centuries the only Pere David's in the world lived in a walled park outside Beijing, where they were hunted exclusively by the Emperor of China, until an enterprising missionary (the eponymous Pere) smuggled a few specimens out to the West. Tracking them takes Twigger around the world, from China to a used-book market in Cairo to the lavish estate of an English duke. The Extinction Club almost gets lost...
...After the war, the public turned against the kamikazes. "The world thought they were crazy fanatics who died shouting banzai for the Emperor," says Hatsuyo Torihama, who is married to another of Tome's grandchildren. Tome waged a one-woman battle to untaint their memory, showing the soldiers' photos to customers and collecting donations for the town to put up a statue of the goddess of mercy in 1955. "But no one came," says Hatsuyo. "Not a soul...
WALL WALKING Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty, was of a very Chinese disposition: he liked walls, the longer the better. His affection for fortification was not merely fanciful: Zhu (also known as Hong Wu) spent 30 years at war with various warlords in his campaign to liberate China from the Mongols. In 1356, Zhu, a Buddhist monk turned soldier, captured Nanjing and declared it his capital. Ten years later, Zhu oversaw the construction of the longest city wall in China: a massive battlement almost 37 kilometers in diameter. Today nearly 21 kilometers are still standing...
...wall makes for a comfortable, even exhilarating walk, about half an hour in either direction. The path, which was rebuilt in the 1980s, is wide and solid, and the view is expansive: the shimmering lake to the north, and Purple Mountain to the east, where Emperor Zhu's tomb still stands...