Word: empresse
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...that the Chou Emperor who ruled China in 1090 had one empress, three consorts, nine spouses, 27 concubines and 81 assistant concubines, whose rotation of duty was exactly scheduled over the course of each fortnight so that the women of highest rank occupied the imperial bed on the nights closest to the full moon...
...Emperor has shared his quiet life with Empress Nagako, 80, whom he married, by traditional arrangement, in 1924. A merry music lover who has enjoyed command performances by Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson, Nagako is also a distinguished painter. On walks, the royal couple like to collect plants, which, it is said, he studies and she sketches. Together they incarnate the classical Japanese ideal of mutual devotion...
...industrial revolution was all but unknown to them. The shogun's court at Edo received various dispatches from pairs of strong-legged runners, one of whom carried state documents in a lacquered box while the other bore a lantern marked "official business." In imperial Kyoto, the Empress and her ladies followed a custom of blackening their teeth...
Modernization took all manner of forms. Tokyo's first gaslights brightened the Ginza in 1874, and four years later came the first electric bulb, which burned out in 15 minutes. The Empress stopped blackening her teeth in 1873. Japan tasted its first butter, its first lemonade...
...tend to locate the origin of the modern novel in the pages of Don Quixote. In fact, the first instance of fully developed narrative occurred 600 years before Cervantes in The Tale of Genji, a 1,135-page work by Lady Murasaki, a member of the court of the Empress Akiko. The 11th century work offers a panoply of "modern" elements; analyses of character, elisions of time and place, divisions into chapters...