Word: tzu
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...lawn of the British Legation in Peking on the afternoon of June 20, 1900, a sergeant reported to the officer commanding the Royal Light Infantry guarding the legation: "Sir, the firing has commenced." The Chinese empire had begun a last feeble fight against the yang kuei-tzu (foreign devils), who had turned China into one of history's great grab bags. In half a century, seven powers had taken eleven bases in China and split 13 of the 18 provinces into "spheres of influence," a gentlemanly phrase for the control of China's trade and government...
...Siege at Peking, Peter Fleming, an able journalist (onetime London Times correspondent) turned military historian (Operation Sea Lion-TIME, July 22, 1957), does not dwell overlong on the corrupt, decaying empire of the Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi, who was only too glad to turn the wrath of the masses from herself. Instead, he concentrates on the rise and fall of the hordes of shrieking peasants who called themselves "Fists of Righteous Harmony" ("Boxers," said a missionary, giving the rebellion its name). Against them for eight weeks stood a handful of isolated foreigners, including some of the great names of future...
...woman who started it all, the Empress Tzu Hsi. escaped by cutting her long, lacquered nails and fleeing Peking disguised as a peasant. But soon the allies wanted her back to administer the last years of the wretched empire. In 1901, she returned to Peking, bowed to applauding foreigners, and went back to the Forbidden City. She ruled China for seven more years until her death in 1908, an evil copy of Britain's Queen Victoria, whom she much admired...
...soldiers are not overburdened with money, it is not because they have a distaste for riches. -Sun Tzu...
Believing with Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism, that inspiration comes in a flash and cannot be long sustained, the Ch'an painter worked in monochrome "as if a whirlwind possessed his hand." Greatest of them all was Liang K'ai, who had won the Emperor's highest painting award, the Golden Girdle, before he retired to a Buddhist monastery. He dashed off such inspired sketches as his Ink Brushing of an Immortal, showing a monk tearing off his shirt to prove the indifference of the enlightened man to outward appearances...