Word: kowtow
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...traditional Confucian concept of decent human relationship. Older people, heretofore respected for their years, were led through streets to prisons or to execution, and on the way Communist youth spat at them. In one Kwangtung province town a grey-haired man was forced to crawl on his knees, kowtow to groups of Red workers...
...down through worked coral, smooth coral, pale blue, dark blue, crystal, ivory and gold. But they all talked the same line. They referred to presents from the British Crown as "tribute." They insisted silkily that matters of commerce could wait. Much more important-was the British ambassador ready to kowtow...
Degrading. Amherst knew about the kowtow-it consisted of kneeling and knocking one's head nine times on the ground before the Manchu Emperor. Thus the envoys of all the world acknowledged the supremacy of the Chinese sovereign. "Repugnant . . . degrading . . . inexpedient," the Britons had decided, "required for the obvious purpose of reducing us to a level with missions from Corea and the Lew-chew islands [i.e., Korea and the Ryukyus, including Okinawa] . . . should be refused...
Once they asked the ambassador to kowtow before the figure of a dragon; the imperial emblem. This 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...
...Britain exacted amends for the great Chinese snub of 1816 (see above). The Opium War was fought, Hong Kong gained, extraterritorial concessions yanked from the declining Celestial Empire. But by last week history seemed to have completed a cycle. A new dynasty ruled in Peking. A new demand for kowtow lay before His Britannic Majesty's government...