Confucius was born 550 years before the birth of Jesus Christ. Ironically, he was born into a time of war and bloodshed and his father was a fearsome warrior. Due to the father’s skills in battle, his king made him governor of Tsou, a village southeast of today’s Beijing.
Although the father had more than one wife, nine daughters and one crippled, sickly son, he was lonely. He wanted a healthy son, so at age seventy Confucius’s father took a 16-year-old concubine who gave him a healthy son, who would become the man we call Confucius. Confucius was not a pretty baby. His head looked like a hill shaped like a crown.
Confucius was not his real name. Twenty-one-hundred years after his birth, Christian missionaries would change his real name to what we know today.
Confucius was three when his father died. Jealous older wives disowned his mother. Facing starvation, mother and child traveled to a nearby city ten miles from the village. Life for Confucius and his mother was not easy and his path to wisdom was going to be hard. The suffering would cause Confucius to vow that he would bring peace to China.
Go to Part 2 of “The Life of Confucius” or hear the music of The Yangqin
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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[…] period started about the time of the Zhou Dynasty between BC 1126 – 226. During this period, Confucius lived in Qufu, in Southwestern Shandong Province, and Sun Tzu wrote “The Art of War,” a book […]
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