Word: mongol
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...drama of East and West has three acts and an optional ending. In Act I, lasting roughly from 500 B.C. to 1000 A.D.. the Far East (India, China) and the Mediterranean world made only fitful contact through commerce and, occasionally, war; the spread of Islam and the Mongol invasions actually "cut off Europe from any direct knowledge of the East." In Act II, lasting roughly from the 16th century to the early 20th, the West, vitalized by ideas of progress and purpose in man's life, turned its power on a static East still lost in the illusion...
Crushed by a Mountain. Such indifference was of no avail when the mighty Mongol hordes, headed by Kubla Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, arrived at the gates of fragrant Hangchou. Before his fierce tribesmen the southern capital fell-crushed, one Chinese historian wrote, as "the Sacred Mountain T'ai would crush an egg." What followed was a galling 100-year reign by the Mongol foreigners...
...horses to maintain rapid communication, from his palace in Peking (which Marco Polo described with its "walls covered with gold and silver") or his pleasure-domed summer palace, with its 16-square-mile enclosed park at Shangtu (the Xanadu of Coleridge's famed verses). But because the Mongol Khans decreed that the elite Confucian scholars -who, under the Sung Dynasty, had ranked just below royalty-should be reduced to a category one degree above beggars, few Chinese scholars showed up in Peking to answer Kubla Khan's invitation to join his court...
Ground Rubies & Nutmegs. The national uprising that finally drove the Mongol troops north of the Great Wall and installed a young peasant on the throne as the first Ming Emperor in 1368 rapidly produced an epicurean age of elegance, not unlike that which marked the courts of Europe in the 18th century. The great pottery works of the Sung emperors were revived and expanded. For Emperor Hsuan-te's Dragon Soup Bowl, craftsmen ground rubies to powder to achieve richness of color; court ladies dipped their fingers into exquisite candy dishes for the cardamoms and nutmegs that served...
...acre tract 20 miles from the site of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, the young King presented ownership deeds for 40-acre plots of land to 20 landless fellahin. The land transfer was particularly symbolic to Iraqis: it marked the first time the area has been irrigated since Mongol hordes wrecked their elaborate irrigation systems 700 years ago. Gaunt, copper-skinned E'Elawi Aboud was one of the first to receive his deed. "My father, my father's father and I have all worked the same land for the same sheik's family," said E'Elawi Aboud...