Word: empresse
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...ceremonial halls (the Emperor will "commute" from his nearby living quarters), each pavilion to be propped serenely on stilts like a Shinto shrine and set shimmering amid a beautiful pine grove. There would be escalators for elderly visitors, a color scheme (snow white and green) to please the Empress, room for horohiki (ancient Imperial horsemanship), polo, garden parties, banquets, and the crowds that gather to greet the Emperor on his birthday and New Year's. In short, the finest building ever to grace Hirohito's reign...
LADY WU, by Lin Yutang. From the remote era of 7th century Imperial China, Author Yutang has recalled an empress who was Cleopatra, Catherine the Great and Lucrezia Borgia rolled into one fiery, demonic woman. Clawing her way from obscurity to power, she killed wantonly and hideously; finally on the throne, she became a model ruler...
During the Thirty Years' War, the Hradčany was sacked by the Swedes, who floated bargeloads of art homeward down the Elbe. The Habsburg descendants contributed to the losses. In 1749, Empress Maria Theresa sold off 69 paintings at bargain rates. After the Habsburgs moved their imperial seat to Vienna, they removed Rudolf's collection from Prague. Between 1865 and 1894 alone, Vienna's palaces gained 312 pictures, including Cranachs, Bruegels and Bassanos. The dispersal has gone on until art from Rudolf's Schatzkammer now hangs across the world, from New York's Metropolitan...
Beastly Nature. If the Devil is a woman, her name is undoubtedly Lady Wu. She was Cleopatra, Catherine the Great and Lucrezia Borgia rolled into one, and from A.D. 655 to 704, first as Empress and later as "female Emperor," she subjected China to a reign of unprecedented terror. In this lightly fictionalized and gruesomely readable account of her career, Lin Yutang dispassionately describes the nature of the beast and the events of an era that still stands as history's most horrible experience of petticoat government...
...Emperor's eye and became -a royal concubine. At 24, she seduced the Emperor's successor and became his favorite. The throne was now her goal. To attain it she strangled her own baby, the new Emperor's daughter, and blamed the crime on the reigning Empress. The Empress was deposed; Lady Wu took her place. Within a year she held all the strings of power, manipulated the Emperor like a puppet. On her secret instructions, the former Empress was horribly done to death-after a ferocious flogging, her hands and feet were...