"Cheap Priceless Editions": Almanach: China

Showing posts with label Almanach: China. Show all posts

23 February 2007

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 23 Febuary

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from Justin Wintle

"There is plenty of gold around but how many white haired friends?"

. . (215) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

22 February 2007

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 22 Febuary

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from Justin Wintle

"A man does not know what poverty is until the bottom of his cooking pot burns through."

. . (207) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

21 February 2007

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 21 Febuary

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from Justin Wintle

. . (207) Chinese

"Fools long for chaos; poor men hope for a riot."

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

20 February 2007

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 20 Febuary

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from Justin Wintle

"Of the ten reasons which lead a judge to his decision, nine are not disclosed."

. . (204) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

18 February 2007

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 18 Febuary

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from Justin Wintle

"A bell must be struck before it rings and a man must be goaded into virtue."

. . (194) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

17 February 2007

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 17 Febuary

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from Justin Wintle

"What is said in private is heard like a peal of thunder in heaven."

. . (191) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

16 February 2007

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 16 Febuary

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from Justin Wintle

"Patience in a moment of anger will save you a hundred days of anguish."

. . (186) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

15 February 2007

Qin Rule

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From:

Ancient China: The Art, Culture and History of the Ancient Cathay

The AncienWeb.org

Much of what came to constitute China Proper was unified for the first time in 221 B.C. In that year the western frontier state of Qin, the most aggressive of the Warring States, subjugated the last of its rival states.

(Qin in Wade-Giles romanization is Ch'in, from which the English China probably derived.)

Once the king of Qin consolidated his power, he took the title Shi Huangdi ( First Emperor), a formulation previously reserved for deities and the mythological sage-emperors, and imposed Qin's centralized, non-hereditary bureaucratic system on his new empire. In subjugating the six other major states of Eastern Zhou, the Qin kings had relied heavily on Legalist scholar-advisers. Centralization, achieved by ruthless methods, was focused on standardizing legal codes and bureaucratic procedures, the forms of writing and coinage, and the pattern of thought and scholarship. To silence criticism of imperial rule, the kings banished or put to death many dissenting Confucian scholars and confiscated and burned their books . Qin aggrandizement was aided by frequent military expeditions pushing forward the frontiers in the north and south.

Tang Writers; Tang Tales

In the middle of the Tang Dynasty many well-known writers and poets began story writing. Their stories incorporate a wide range of subject matter and themes, reflecting various aspects of human nature, human relations and social life. In form they are not short notes or anecdotes like the tales produced before them, but well-structured stories with interesting plots and vivid characters, often several thousand words in length. Among them are many tales whose main characters are gods, ghosts, or foxes.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 15 Febuary

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from Justin Wintle

"Do not dispair because there's no go-between; books can provide you with a queen more beautiful than jade."

. . (182) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

12 February 2007

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 12 Febuary

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from Justin Wintle

"It is the horse that dines in the night that puts on weight."

. . (171) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

11 February 2007

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 11 Febuary

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from Justin Wintle

"If you do not discuss the faults of others, no one will blame you for not discussing your own."

. . (168) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

Artifacts of the opium trade _ gnarled wood of the Thai phrik khi nu chili bush

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Blogaulaire just couldn't resist sticking those words in a title after reading them on-line at time.com in an article from March, 2003. Here are those words again, in a full sentence:

"These pipes are part of the museum's collection, including one fashioned from the gnarled wood of the Thai phrik khi nu chili bush, which was said to impart a spicy flavor to the opium smoke."

Pipe Dreams in the Golden Triangle

By Steven Martin
Mar. 17, 2003

"High and Low: Visitors can check out facsimiles of Asia's infamous opium dens at the Thai museum"

In the early 1950s, newly communist China took draconian steps to rid its population of addicts, but the vice lingered for another decade in the expatriate-Chinese communities of Southeast Asia. Thailand was the last place in the world with licensed opium dens. In 1959 those licenses were revoked; the Heng Lak Hung on Bangkok's Charoeng Krung Road, said to be the world's largest opium den, with more than 5,000 users in residence, shut its doors, and thousands of opium pipes, lamps and other smoking equipment were burned in a massive bonfire at the royal cremation grounds near the Grand Palace.

In the past few years, however, aficionados of Asian art and antiquities have rediscovered the dens' often delightfully ornate accoutrements: pipes, oil lamps, pipe bowls, opium trays and beds. When curators began gathering artifacts for the Hall of Opium, some of the best pieces were found in the Thai Excise Department.

. . .

Patterns on pipe bowls ranged from geometrical designs, such as the Hindu swastika (also used in Buddhist art), to whimsical portraits of Chinese roosters, tigers, dragons and phoenixes, to floral renderings of bamboos, orchids and peach blossoms. To those versed in Chinese iconography, this is rich irony: these positive attributes so artfully symbolized -- longevity, strength, happiness and wealth -- were all certainly lacking in the lives of the average opium addict.

The Hall of Opium uses a multimedia approach to trace the history of opium from highly valued ingredient in the pharmacopoeia of the ancients to the scourge of addiction that brought China to its knees in the 19th and 20th centuries. There is a re-creation of a British East India Company clipper ship's hold and its cargo of opium from India destined for the South China coast and a reproduction of a typical 19th century opium den, where a visitor can take himself through the opium smoker's paces (sans opium, of course).

Patrons, according to this life-size diorama, entered through an innocuous-looking tea shop. The poorer users could choose doses of low-grade opium self-administered in spartan surroundings. Better-heeled junkies could smoke pipes of pure opium prepared by servants in opulently furnished rooms. Lest visitors get carried away amid their reveries, the curators have mounted cautionary tributes to entertainers who overdosed, such as River Phoenix and Zhu Jie.

On Cheap Priceless Enditions, we reviewed Nick Tosches. THE LAST OPIUM DEN. (Bloomsbury, January 8, 2002, $12.95, cloth) HERE.

That CPE post touched on the subject of opium as a typical theme of the grit lit genre.