Since I wrote about fairy tales yesterday, I thought I’d write about a fairy tale today and let you know that the first known literary version of Cinderella in the world was published in China.
There is a myth that an earlier version existed in Egypt around the first century. If true, since Egypt did not have printing presses then, this may have been an oral story told around camp fires.
However, in 850 AD during the Tang Dynasty, the Chinese version of Cinderella was about a girl called Yeh-hsien. Source: Tales of Faerie
Although this video claims the Chinese Cinderella had bound feet, according to Bound Feet Women, foot binding didn’t appear in China until the Sung Dynasty (960-1276 AD), more than a century after Cinderella was first published.
The French version of Cinderella wouldn’t be published by Charles Perrault until 1697. Then another version of Cinderella would appear in 1867 and again in 1894 in England.
In 1945, the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow would present the premiere of Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet of Cinderella.
Walt Disney wouldn’t publish a version of Cinderella until 1946, more than a thousand years after Cinderella first appeared in China.
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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 Huffington Post reported this month (December 2010) that a collection of Grimm Brothers’ classic fairy tales was pulled from bookstores in China.
Since we hear so often about censorship in China, doesn’t that sound as if this children’s book was censored.
However, China’s government was not involved.
In China, even in the state-run media, reporters that write the stories or editors do most of the censorship. Being Chinese, these people know what is culturally acceptable by the people and politically sensitive to the Party.
In fact, people that work for China’s state run media are often proud of their self-censorship.
Agence France-Presse (AFP), which is one of the three largest and the oldest (founded in 1835 and reborn in 1944) news agency, broke this story about the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales.
There are more facts to this than I shared with you in the lead paragraph, which is what the Western media often does when writing about China.
To be fair, both the AFP and Huffington Post did say in their leads the reason for the censorship of this book.
“An X-rated collection of Grimm Brothers’ classic fairy tales – including one in which the heroine engages in sexual relations with both her father and seven dwarves -– has been pulled from children’s bookstores in China.”
“Readers called us to say they did not think the book was healthy for children,” said Li Yong, the deputy chairman of the publisher, as quoted by the Telegraph saying. “After that, we pulled all the copies off shelves across the country….”
It turns out that the book was a Japanese pornographic reinterpretation of the fairy tales.
Learn more about the China Daily, which is part of the state-run media giant in the PRC.
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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.
Snopes.com verifies rumors and myths about many things including China. Although the list of rumors of China was long, I’ll list just five.
1. A claim that the U.S. government agreed to allow China to exercise “eminent domain” as collateral for American debt is FALSE. China may not take land, buildings, factories and entire cities inside the USA to satisfy the financial obligations of the US government.
2. The rumor that Costco warehouse club stores are owned by China is FALSE. Maybe Wal-Mart started this one. However, there are Wal-Mart stores in China. Costco isn’t in China yet.
3. As crazy as the 2010-midterm elections were, I didn’t hear this lie to discredit Democrats and President Obama claiming that the Obama administration was selling the blueprints for the B-2 Stealth Bomber to China in exchange for debt relief. Snopes found this rumor was FALSE.
The interesting thing about Snopes.com is if possible it provides links to the origin of the lie/myth. If you check on a rumor or myth, read all of the Snopes.com explanation.
4. Since there have been so many complaints of food exported to the US from China being tainted, know that the “Mandarin Menace” was proven FALSE by Snopes.com. Pesticide used on mandarin oranges imported from China was “not” causing allergic reactions among U.S. consumers.
Snopes could find no reports or officially used warning to support the claim that a new pesticide being used in China is causing a pattern of allergic reactions among U.S. consumers.
Then some people want to believe the myths and lies.
5. The belief that fortune cookies originated in China is also FALSE. By World War II, fortune cookies were being offered in Chinese restaurants in San Francisco and from there the practice spread to the rest of the country.
In fact, no one knows who invented the fortune cookie but it did not start in China and in all my trips to China since 1999, I have never seen a fortune cookie in any of the restaurants I’ve eaten in from Xian to Guilin.
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.
Another reason that China’s government does not want the Pope to rule over China’s Catholics is because of the Catholic Church’s political meddling and bloody history.
In 1088, Pope Urban II was responsible for launching the First Crusade to rescue the Holy Land from the Turks.
In 1147, King Louis VII was enlisted by Bernard of Clairvaux, a French abbot in the Catholic Church, to lead the Second Crusade.
Pope Gregory VIII proclaimed the Third Crusade in 1188.
During the Fourth Crusade in 1202, European Christians sacked Constantinople, a Christian city in Turkey.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Church waged war against the Christian Cather religious sect in the Languedoc region of France and in other parts of Europe. The last known Cathar leader was executed in 1321.
Then there were the four Inquisitions from 1184 to 1860 along with the religious wars that followed the reformation.
Protestants and Catholics shed each other’s blood in national wars and in civil wars from 1562 to 1648.
Then there is the fact that the Pope issues edicts for his followers and some of them go against Chinese law such as the one-child policy designed to control the growth of China’s population.
In addition, China has never had a religion that dominated its culture as in the West and the Middle East.
Moreover, if you are one of those people that believes the Church has changed its evil ways consider how it has shielded priests accused of molesting children or the money laundering by the Vatican’s bank.
Although Chinese believe in heaven and God, most do not believe n God and heaven the same as Christianity and Islam do.
In China, the people are raised to honor the ancestors and obey the central government’s laws not the laws and edicts of a religion.
Catholics in China are free to worship but not free to have the Pope be their spiritual and political ruler since the Pope often issues edicts that influence political beliefs leading to civil unrest and more pressure on China to change.
In fact, China is often depicted as an atheist nation, which is far from the truth.
In China, it is believed by many that Heaven is said to see, hear and watch over all men (sounds like God to me). Heaven is affected by man’s doings, and having personality, is happy and angry with them. Heaven blesses those who please it and sends calamities upon those who offend it.
Heaven was also believed to transcend all other spirits and gods, with Confucius asserting, “He who offends against Heaven has none to whom he can pray.”
If anything, most Chinese are guilty of being Deists (as many of America’s Founding Fathers were) or nonreligious since they do not belong to or believe in religions.
Since both Christian and Islamic sects believe they must convert nonbelievers, it must be frustrating to the Catholic Pope that he cannot have freedom to convert as many as possible in China.
It is obvious that the Catholic Church and other world religions want China to change its culture to accept religion as the rest of the world does.
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.
What happened in China between the Communists and Nationalists during the revolution isn’t the reason China is blocking the Pope from having the same level of control of China’s Catholics that he has over the rest of the world’s Catholics.
The Vatican is a sovereign nation. Of 195 countries in the world, three are not members of the UN and the Vatican City/The Holy See is one of those three nations.
The independent papal state of less than 1,000 people chose not to join the UN.
Instead, the Vatican is a Permanent Observer in the UN and the Holy See enjoys, among other things, the right to participate in the general debate of the General Assembly; the right of reply; the right to have its communications issued and circulated directly as official documents of the UN assembly; and the right to co-sponsor draft resolutions and decisions that make reference to the Holy See. Source: Holy See Mission.org
The Vatican is listed as the smallest nation with the smallest population on the globe, yet the Pope rules over about a billion Catholics scattered throughout the world as if he were a world leader and they were the citizens of his nation.
In fact, since nations have banks, the Associated Press recently reported that the Vatican’s bank was mired in a laundering scandal.
The Pope is elected for life by the Church’s bishops as if he were a religious dictator. The Pope decides if it is wrong to divorce, have abortions, etc. He even prescribes dietary laws such as only eating fish on Friday.
Allowing the Pope to lead China’s Catholics would be the same as letting the US President lead all American expatriates living and working in China regardless of China’s laws.
In Part 3, we shall see how the Catholic Church waged war against all who threatened its existence.
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 
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