Word: sovereignity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...sovereign democratic republic, in the Hindi language, is Sampoorna Prabhutva Sampanna Lokatantratmaka Ganarajya. Last week, that is what India became.After weeks of work, laborers with chisels and paintbrushes had managed to remove hundreds of crowns from furniture, doorways and walls of New Delhi's great sandstone Government House. The words "Royal" and "His Majesty's" had been taken off mailboxes, trucks and ships. India was breaking her last symbolic bonds to Britain. Declaring Jan. 26 Republic Day,* the government gathered in New Delhi's Durbar Hall to inaugurate its new constitution and install its first President...