The Lessons of Chinese History
Since everyone I know is taking the History of China lecture this semester, I have plenty of opportunities to talk about it. We've only had two lectures and two readings so far, but some salient points have already come out. Since in college it's essential be able to distill readings to a sentence for those friends who utterly fail at homework, I've become pretty adept at picking out main points. This is especially easy since Spence's book is much more readable than the majority of history textbooks, and occasionally has these crazy one-liners that give me pause.
The first important point from the Ming Dynasty is this: Don't trust eunuchs. We read 40 pages about the late Ming Dynasty, and that was the one salient point. Sure there was something about court intrigue, massive famine and plague, and the encroachment of the Manchus, but the main problem was the eunuchs.
The second chapter dealt more with the Manchus and the fall of the Ming Dynasty. One of the Ming generals gets trapped between the Manchus and a rebel group. He chooses to side with the Manchus. Midway through the reading, there was one of Spence's one-liners. General Wu seems to have chosen the Manchus either for some completely logical reason, or because the rebel general stole his concubine. After reading this, I was unable to focus on the rest of the reading, except for the portion about a man either committing suicide or being beaten to death my peasants. How can there be an ambiguity there? How are those things at all similar? But anyway, the second point is this: If you want to take over a country, don't steal an important generals' concubines. Or generally avoid stealing anyone's concubine. They might set eunuchs on you.
For Monday: The return of my fashion rants.
In other news, I forgot a password for a site I'm on, and the password hint was, "What is a relationship?" What the fuck was I thinking?
The first important point from the Ming Dynasty is this: Don't trust eunuchs. We read 40 pages about the late Ming Dynasty, and that was the one salient point. Sure there was something about court intrigue, massive famine and plague, and the encroachment of the Manchus, but the main problem was the eunuchs.
The second chapter dealt more with the Manchus and the fall of the Ming Dynasty. One of the Ming generals gets trapped between the Manchus and a rebel group. He chooses to side with the Manchus. Midway through the reading, there was one of Spence's one-liners. General Wu seems to have chosen the Manchus either for some completely logical reason, or because the rebel general stole his concubine. After reading this, I was unable to focus on the rest of the reading, except for the portion about a man either committing suicide or being beaten to death my peasants. How can there be an ambiguity there? How are those things at all similar? But anyway, the second point is this: If you want to take over a country, don't steal an important generals' concubines. Or generally avoid stealing anyone's concubine. They might set eunuchs on you.
For Monday: The return of my fashion rants.
In other news, I forgot a password for a site I'm on, and the password hint was, "What is a relationship?" What the fuck was I thinking?
posted by Meredith at 4:45 PM
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