Word: hsi
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Near the end of his reign in 1722, the Chinese Emperor K'ang-hsi again turned to his copy of the I Ching. Nothing he found under the entry for "Retreat" seemed to apply to rulers. "There is no place for rulers to rest," he told his followers in a valedictory address. "Bowing down in service and wearing oneself out," he concluded, "indeed applies to this situation...
...what a way to go. For 61 years K'ang-hsi ruled China, an area larger than Peter the Great's Russia. To 150 million Chinese, this Manchu monarch was lawgiver, supreme judge, jury, protector and executioner, and one of the busiest executives in history. He supervised a vast civil service meritocracy laid down on Confucian principles that recognized society as a hierarchy of intelligence over ignorance. Like Confucius, K'ang-hsi viewed statecraft as applied knowledge in the service of the governed, and he worried about his people before they worried about themselves...
...addition to running the world's largest country and fathering 56 children with 30 consorts, K'ang-hsi found time to write the equivalent of 16,000 Western printed pages. Official documents, letters, memoranda, verse and private thoughts were collected as the Venerable Record. In Emperor of China, Jonathan Spence, professor of Chinese history at Yale, has pruned and selected this record. In the tradition of Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, he has created what he calls an "autobiographical biography." But it is more than that. From the Emperor's resplendent portrait on the dust...
...sensitive Soviet border testified to continuing Chinese concern over the Russian troop buildup in the area. But there was speculation that his transfer north was also designed to loos en his grip on Peking and at the same tune dismantle the network of personal loyalties built up by Chen Hsi-lien, 60, the military commander of the northern region for more than 14 years. Chen was sent to Peking as commander of the capital military region. Another powerful Politburo member, Hsu Shih-yu, 67, was uprooted from the comfortable Yangtze barony of the Nanking military region he had held...
...performances that it may come as a shock for American audiences to learn that the National Chinese Opera Theater did not exist six months ago. Peking opera has had its hard core of followers on Taiwan, but nothing to match the popular appeal of the Ko Tsai Hsi, the Chinese folk opera company that regularly performs at festivals and on Taiwan...