A brief history of silk: Part 1 of 2

August 27, 2013

I read an Associated Press piece by Mansur Mirovalev about silk’s so-called dark side where Uzbek children had to work and grow cocoons.


Silkworms in a Chinese silk factory

However, that’s not what this post is about.  I will say this. I didn’t see much that was wrong in Mirovalev’s piece about what was taking place in Uzbekistan. About a century ago, American children once worked in the fields alongside their parents. I see nothing wrong with that.

In fact, for most of history, children were just seen as smaller people and had to work just like adults did.


Worker makes silk cloth from a silkworm.

I’ve often read about the Silk Road, but I was curious and wanted to know more about the history of silk so I did some Google research and discovered that silk has a long history in China.

For example, in 1984, silk fabric dating back more than 5000 years was found in Henan Province.


How silk is made.

According to legend, Lei Zu, the queen of China’s legendary Yellow Emperor, was drinking a cup of tea beneath a mulberry tree one day when a silkworm cocoon fell into her cup. Further investigation revealed that the unraveling fibers were light and tough, ripe for spinning. Thus China’s silk industry was born.

What I didn’t know was that merchants from the Roman Empire sent ships by sea to China and traded directly with the Han Dynasty. It’s well known that China traded with India, the Persians and even Europe using a land route called the silk road across Asia. But this was the first time I heard of ships from Europe reaching China about two thousand years ago.

Continued on August 29, 2013 in A brief history of silk: Part 2

Discover A Millennia of History at a Silk Road Oasis

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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.

His latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

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China’s long, violent history with Vietnam

August 22, 2013

After the death of Stalin, relations between the Soviet Union and China turned sour while the Russians and the Vietnamese developed a closer relationship.

To counter this perceived threat, China encouraged Cambodia to take aggressive action against Vietnam. By the end of 1978, the Cambodians under the leadership of Pol Pot launched a series of attacks along the Vietnam border.

The Vietnamese retaliated with armored units and captured the capital of Cambodia on January 7, 1979.

Since ten-thousand Chinese military advisers in Camboida became prisoners, China loses face.

On February 15, 1979, China invaded Vietnam to teach it a lesson.

The Vietnamese decided to hold back their regular army and defend the border with militia units using guerilla tactics in the hills and rainforest similar to how they fought America.

China takes heavy casualties after attacking and soon returns to China.

China has a long history with Vietnam. The First Chinese domination of Vietnam took place in 207 BC to 39 AD. The second occupation was from 43 to 544 AD.  The third was from 602 to 905 AD.  The fourth was between 1407 to 1427 AD.

Then France ruled over Vietnam from 1862 until the Japanese invaded during World War II. The French would return in 1946 and fight the Vietnamese until 1954.

The US and Vietnam, once enemies during the American-Vietnam War (1961 – 1975), are now allied to block China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.  Source: Goldsea Asian American News

Discover China and India at War in 1962

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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.

His latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

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The Cultural Perception of Human Rights

August 20, 2013

I was reading A Different Turning Point for Mankind by G. W. Bowersock in the May 9, 2013 issue of The New York Review of Books, and I had one of those Aha! moments when I read about the history of several different cultural philosophies and ideologies.

For millennia, the major cultures on the planet have been: Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian, Chinese, Hindu, Islamic and Buddhist.

But the concept of human rights that dominates the planet today has its roots from ancient Greece and Rome—not China, Africa, India, or the Middle East.

This Western, Greek-Roman concept of human rights that evolved over a period of centuries to dominate the planet today came about due to the fire and brimstone of the colonial era of the 18th and 19th centuries where European countries such as Spain, England, France, Germany, Portugal and Italy ruled, often brutally, over most of the planet. Then later the United States joined in building a global empire—again on a Greek-Roman, Christian foundation.

When Western citizens criticize China—or Asia, the Middle East or Africa for that matter—for human rights violations, these cultures are not being judged by their own perception of what human rights might mean. Instead, the West may be forcing its beliefs on those cultures.

In the West, human rights are based on the ideology of the self that emphasizes autonomy, but this is not relevant to a Confucian based society that stresses the primacy of community and the person’s obligation to others. Source: University of Illinois Press

And for the Islamic Middle East, Professor Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im says, “Shari’ah, which is the historical foundations of Islamic law, directly affects the millions of Muslims around the world. Because of its moral and religious authority, it has great influence on the status of human rights for Muslim countries.”

For example: Are human rights claims based on status as an individual human being or status as a member of some community or group of people? Because traditional cultures do not always view the individual as an autonomous being possessed of rights above society. Source: Asia-Pacific Human Rights Information Center

Also, world hunger and poverty influence the concept of human rights—that may be only a momentary luxury because of developed countries where citizens have time to debate human rights instead of worry where the next meal or drink of water will come from. It may be a challenge to want democracy and human rights when you are starving.

“The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly 870 million people, or one in eight people in the world, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2010-2012. Almost all the hungry people, 852 million, live in developing countries, representing 15 percent of the population of developing counties.” Source: World Hunger.org

If you were one of the hungry billion suffering from chronic undernourishment, would you be sitting around worrying about freedom of expression/religion, democracy [If you have never tasted democracy, how can you be expected to understand it?] and equal pay for men and women?

Discover Human Rights the Chinese Way

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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.

His latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

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The Father of China’s Republic, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen

August 15, 2013

“An individual should not have too much freedom. A nation should have absolute freedom.” – Dr. Sun Yat-Sen (1866 – 1925)

He is referred to as the father of modern China.  If there were no Sun Yat-Sen and his revolution, there might not be a modern China as it is known today.

While attending a Christian school in Hawaii (1882), he converted to Christianity, which shaped his revolutionary future. It was obvious that his writing was influenced by American thought. With the support he received from the Hawaiian Chinese community, he networked with Chinese people all over the world.

He went on to publish revolutionary ideas seeking to overthrow the Manchu Dynasty and create the Republic of China. In 1904, he wrote that he wanted to model China’s government after America but by combining Western thought with Chinese tradition.

Yet, he was considered an idealistic dreamer—that his ideas were impractical. He said, “The whole world is one family.” (1910)

In 1882, when Sun Yat-Sen was exposed to American politics, the United States was a republic—not the democracy we know today—and women did not have the right to vote yet. What type of republic do you think he wanted for China—one closer to the America of 1882 or today?

Discover The Roots of Madness

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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.

His latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

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Interracial love in China during World War II, a book review of “Shanghai Love”

August 13, 2013

From the title, we already know the story is about love in Shanghai, and it doesn’t take long to discover who the two main characters are that are destined to meet.

It is 1938, and in chapter one, we are introduced to Peilin in China. In chapter two we meet Henri in Nazi Germany.

But the love story isn’t what made this novel worth reading. It was the journey the two characters must take to find each other. They are both doctors. Henri is Jewish and trained in western medicine. He has to leave his family behind in Germany and flee to China to avoid Hitler’s Nazis who are hunting for him because he dared to love a woman who was not Jewish.

Peilin was trained by her grandfather in Chinese herbal medicine, and by the time Henri meets her, she has already been married to a ghost for some time.

As a young girl, a marriage was arranged to a boy almost twice Peilin’s age, but when he was a young man—before the marriage—he was killed in combat fighting the Japanese who invaded China in July of 1937. By the time Pearl Harbor is bombed by the Japanese in December 1941, China has already been fighting Japan for more than four years. To give you an idea of how horrible it was, by the end of World War II, China lost ten to twenty million people to the war compared to 418,500 for the United States.

One would think with her fiancé dead, Peilin would be free to move on with her life, but no—because in China it is expected that Peilin must still marry the man’s ghost, stay a virgin for life and live with her in-laws who will buy a baby for her to raise as if she were its biological mother and the dead man its father.

Shanghai-Love-front-cover-194x300

The story is set in an era when both the Chinese and Europeans disapproved of interracial relationships. In Germany, there was racism against the Jews. But in China, there is prejudice from some Chinese because Henri is white. In addition, many of the Jewish refugees look down on the Chinese culture and disapprove of Henri spending time with Peilin. It seems that these two are fated to be star-crossed lovers.

I recommend reading this story because it offers a reminder of the horrors of war and racism. During World War II, 20,000 European Jews fled to Shanghai, one of the few places in the world that put no limits on the number of Jews it would accept.

Another plot thread that runs through the novel is the focus on Chinese herbal medicine and how different it is from the western concept of medical care. The Chinese were studying advanced medical care long before the West. In fact, Chinese medical tradition is more than 5,000 years old including herbal medicine, acupuncture, massage, exercise and dietary therapy—concepts that the West didn’t pay serious attention to until near the end of the 20th century.

I’m not going to tell you how the love story turns out between Henri and Peilin. You will have to buy and read the novel to discover that.

Layne Wong, the author of Shanghai Love

Layne Wong, the author of Shanghai Love

I bought my copy of “Shanghai Love” by Layne Wong at an author event held at the Bancroft Hotel in Berkeley, California earlier in 2013.

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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.

His latest novel is the multiple-award winning Running with the Enemy.

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4 Comments | book review, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, Chinese women, cultural differences, expatriates, family values, health care, history | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
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