Late one recent afternoon, I checked an e-mail account I haven’t visited for weeks. To my surprise, I discovered good news—which in this case adds truth to better late than never.
On October 25, 2010, The National Best Books 2010 Awards sent me an e-mail letting me know that my second novel, Our Hart, Elegy for a Concubine, was one of eight Finalists in Fiction & Literature: Historical Fiction.
The winner was A Sudden Dawn, YMAA Publication Center, Inc.
ISBN: 978-1-594391989
A Sudden Dawn must be an incredible book. When I checked, it had 32 customer reviews on Amazon with an average of five stars.
I learned that the winning author was Goran Powell, 4th dan, GojuRyu Karate.
He is author of two martial arts books, a freelance writer in London and recipient of numerous advertising awards.
Powell is a regular contributor to martial arts magazines and has twice appeared on the cover of Traditional Karate magazine. This is his first novel. Powell resides in London with his wife and three children.
A Sudden Dawn is an epic historical fiction novel that opens with a young man named Sardili born of the Indian warrior caste in 507 AD.
Sardili realizes that he would rather seek enlightenment than follow his family’s military legacy and sets out on a life-long quest for truth and wisdom.
Sardili becomes the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma, known as Da Mo in China.
He travels throughout India, brings Buddhism to China, and establishes the Shaolin Temple as the birthplace of Zen and the Martial Arts.
It’s ironic that the winning novel was set in India then China but centuries apart from the China where Robert Hart lived and worked for more than five decades.
Our Hart, Elegy for a Concubine, is the sequel to My Splendid Concubine, and continues the love story that Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
The woman was Hart’s concubine, Ayaou. She remained a mystery for more than a century.
Hart arrived in China in 1854. By 1908, he was the godfather of China’s modernization. The Qing Dynasty royalty called him “Our Hart”.
Both Powell’s novel and Our Hart are based on the lives of real men who had an impact on the history of China.
Then there is Ayaou, Hart’s Chinese concubine. Hart once wrote to a friend in England that Ayaou was the most sensible person he’d ever known and he was a fool.
______________
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
China’s longest lasting dynasties survived due to one or more great emperors.
After China was unified by Qin Shi Huangdi (221 – 207 BC), there were only five dynasties that survived for long periods — the Han, Tang, Sung, Ming, and Qing Dynasties.
Although China’s civilization survived, the country’s history is rampant with rebellions, palace coups, corruption among palace officials, and insurrections. Between the five longest dynasties, the country usually fell apart into warring states as it did after 1911.
The most successful emperors managed to stabilize the country while managing wisely as the Communist Party has done since 1976.
EmperorHan Wudi (ruled 141 – 87 B.C.) of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. – 219 A.D.) was fifteen when he first sat on the throne.
Wudi is considered one of the greatest emperors in China’s history. He expanded the borders, opened the early Silk Road, developed the economy, and established state monopolies on salt, liquor and rice.
After the Han Dynasty collapsed, China fell apart for almost 400 years before the Tang Dynasty was established (618 -906). The Tang Dynasty was blessed with several powerful emperors.
The first was Emperor Tang Taizong (ruled 627-649).
According to historical records, Wu Zetain, China’s only woman emperor also ruled wisely.
Emperor Tang Zuanzong , Zetain’s grandson, ruled longer than any Tang emperor and the dynasty prospered while he sat on the throne.
After the dynasty fell, there would be short period of about 60 years before the Sung Dynasty reestablished order and unified the country again.
The second emperor of the Sung Dynasty, Sung Taizong (ruled 976 – 997) unified China after defeating the Northern Han Dynasty. The third emperor, Sung Zhenzong (ruled 997-1022) also deserves credit for maintaining stability.
The Sung Dynasty then declined until a revival by Sung Ningzong (ruled 1194 – 1224) After he died, the dynasty limped along until Kublai Khan defeated the last emperor in 1279.
After conquering all of China, Kublai Khan founded the Mongol, Yuan Dynasty (1277-1367). Not long after Kublai died, the dynasty was swept away.
In 1368, a peasant rebellion defeated the Yuan Dynasty and drove the Mongols from China.
The Ming Dynasty (1271 – 1368) is known for rebuilding, strengthening and extending the Great Wall among a list of other accomplishments.
Historical records show that the rule of the third Ming Emperor, Ming Chengzu (ruled 1403 – 1424), was the most prosperous period.
After Chengzu, the dynasty would decline until 1567 when Emperor Ming Muzong reversed the decline.
His son, Emperor Ming Shenzong, also ruled wisely from 1573 to 1620.
After Shenzong’s death, the Ming Dynasty quickly declined and was replaced by the Qing Dynasty in 1644.
The Opium Wars started by England and France and the Taiping Rebellion led by a Christian convert in the 19th century would contribute to the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911.
The Qing Dynasty was fortunate to have three powerful, consecutive emperors: Emperor Kangxi (1661 – 1722), Yongzhen (1722-1735) and Qianlong (1735-1796). For one-hundred-and-thirty-five years, China remained strong and prosperous.
After the corrupt Qing Dynasty was swept aside in 1911 by a rebellion led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, China fell apart and warlords fought to see who would rule China.
When Sun Yat-sen died, the republic he was building in southern China fell apart when Chiang Kai-shek broke the coalition that Sun Yat-sen had formed between the Nationalist and Communist Parties. Mao’s famous Long March shows how the Communists survived.
Then Japan invaded, and China would be engulfed in war and rebellion until 1945 when World War II ended. After World War II, the rebellion between the Nationalist and Communists ended in victory for the Communists in 1949.
This victory was made possible because the Communists were supported by China’s peasants that hated, despised and distrusted the Nationalist Party, which represented China’s ruling elite.
The Communists gained the support of the peasants by treating the peasants with respect and promising reforms that would end the suffering.
Then Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution extended the peasants suffering.
However, since the early 1980s, the Communist Party has been working to fulfill the promises made during the revolution, and the lifestyles of China’s peasants are slowly improving.
There are many impatient voices in the West and a few in China that are not happy with the speed of China’s reforms or how the Party has handled them.
In fact, China has modernized and improved lifestyles in China since the early 1980s at a pace that has never been seen before in recorded history.
_______________
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.
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves.
Subscribe to “iLook China”!
Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.
What Richard Fernandez wrote about the current situation in Korea for Belmont Club of Pajamas Media was wrong. He wrote,” Barack Obama … is beaten before he starts” as if the only response is to declare total war on North Korea to punish them for what they did.
Anyone who studied and understands Sun Tzu’s The Art of War knows that retaliation of North Korea would be a lose-lose situation for everyone involved.
What was lost? Two South Korean soldiers were killed and a dozen injured. There was no invasion or huge loss of life.
Let us not forget that the Korean Conflict never ended in the 1950s. North and South Korea are technically still at war and these flare-ups are a continuation of that conflict.
The problem with invading or bombing North Korea is that millions of Koreans on both sides of the DMZ would die.
Then Fernandez spends time on North Korea’s nuclear weapons and writes about nonproliferation indicating that if Obama doesn’t use force to punish North Korea, then Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore will eventually take steps to acquire nuclear weapons making the world a more dangerous place.
Obama is not a cowboy from the neoconservative, nation-building hawks of the Bush Whitehouse.
Instead, Obama has borrowed a tactic from President Theodore Roosevelt. Obama talks softly but carries a big stick, and America’s enemies and allies in Asia know this.
After all, in 2010, President Obama sent another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan and you seldom win shooting wars without shedding blood.
The Nationsays, “The Obama administration is trying to kill its way to victory in Afghanistan.”
In fact, Obama still uses the infamous Blackwater to find insurgent targets in Pakistan. The Nation says, “These are not people that believe that Barack Obama is a socialist, these are not people that kill innocent civilians. They’re very good at what they do.”
“Since President Barack Obama was inaugurated, The United States has expanded drone bombing raids in Pakistan,” The Nation says. “Obama first ordered a drone strike against targets in North and South Waziristan on January 23, and the strikes have been conducted consistently ever since.”
“The Obama administration has now surpassed the number of Bush-era strikes in Pakistan and has faced fierce criticism from Pakistan (without Obama backing down) …”
One comment to Richard Fernandez post about Korea says China would come across the Yalu River as it did in the 50s. That’s also wrong since America could destroy North Korea without a ground invasion. It could all be done from the air. Then we could ignore North Korea.
In fact, Mao ruled the China of the 50s. When Mao died in 1976, revolutionary Maoism was repudiated and the Maoists swept from power.
Then in 1982, China wrote a new Constitution with term and age limits for politicians. Since Mao died, China has had four presidents because the law says the president of China may only serve two five-year terms. The 1982 Constitution also has an article of impeachment.
Today, China is an open market, hybrid capitalist, socialist republic that spent the last three decades building a modern China. That could all be lost by sending troops across the Yalu River to support North Korea as Mao did.
Imagine what would happen if the US destroyed the Three Gorges Damn with cruise missiles.
Then there’s what Time said last year. “South Korea, backed by the U.S., doesn’t want war, because the North has some 13,000 artillery tubes aimed at Seoul and more than 10 million South Koreans living within 30 miles of the DMZ.
“North Korea, backed by China, doesn’t want war because if it comes, it all but guarantees the collapse of Kim’s regime, which is also the family business.“
______________
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
We must be careful not to allow the “free” Western media, which often practices the exaggerations of Yellow Journalism to gain a larger audience share, to turn us into virtual on-line paranoid freaks.
In fact, Americans seldom hear that other nations around the globe also have the same challenges with Internet Security as the US does.
The following newscast from CCTV proves that we are not alone. The Chinese also suffer from virtual viruses and crimes.
It doesn’t take a government-funded agency to create a virus or other Internet threats. Any hacker may do so, and China Internet Watch reported 420 million Chinese Internet users on-line in 2010.
China has a National Computer Network Emergency Response Center. In 2009, the Center said, “Internet security cases have been on the rise in recent years posing severe challenges to information safety (in China).
“Hackers can profit from renting or selling computer information.… This crime has caused over 4.5 billion yuan in losses.”
The Center says, “The number of viruses and assaults launched by hackers number in the tens of thousands and the number of attacks is rising by one-third each year.”
The Ministry of Public Security and State Information Center has launched an exclusive campaign to protect Internet security.
For example, in December 2009, China found eleven guilty in a virus case and sent the defendants to jail for up to three years for their role in creating on-line viruses in east China. This on-line gang reportedly made illegal gains of 646,000 yuan or about 94,600 US dollars.
It was reported that 80 people across China were involved in this crime and more trials were expected.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
The reputation of the Chinese products that Admiral Zheng He took with him on his voyages brought him considerable honor and made him welcome everywhere he visited.
On his sixth voyage, he reached the African coast and twelve hundred envoys from sixteen African and Asian countries returned to China with Zheng He’s fleet.
In Beijing, the Ming Emperor presented these envoys with 40 thousand roles of silk and brocade.
Even before the Ming Dynasty, China had been sending diplomatic missions overland to the West for centuries and trade had extended as far as east Africa.
However, never before had a government-sponsored mission the size of Zheng He’s fleet been organized.His voyages were a vivid demonstration of the economic and cultural prosperity of the Ming Dynasty.
In 1420, the year the Forbidden City was completed, the Yongle Emperor’s Bell was successfully cast.
The Forbidden City is a testament to Chinese architecture and engineering while in Europe it was still the Middle Ages.
The Great Wall, which the Ming Dynasty had continued to build and strengthen, stretched from China’s eastern coast to the far northwest.
In 1637, the largest encyclopedia of ancient China was published — a comprehensive book covering science and handicraft technologies.
Another encyclopedia was published on agriculture.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
iLook China 