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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
Luyu’s audience in China averages 140 million. Her show is called A Date With Luyu, which tackles issues that traditionally have been censored by Chinese media officials. The show’s guests have included people who are HIV-positive, lesbians and transsexuals.
Of Yue-sai Kan, The Conversation: The Most Famous Woman in China says she is a journalist, television host, entrepreneur and author and has been a key figure in modern Chinese culture for 20 years. About 300 million Chinese watch her show.
People Magazine called Yue-sai Kan the most famous woman in China. Money Magazine described her as a Modern Day Marco Polo.
After Kan hosted a live broadcast from China in 1984 for PBS, China’s government asked her to produce One World, the first television series ever produced and hosted by an American on China’s only national network, CCTV. Source: Women of China
The next Chinese Oprah is Hong Huang, who hosts a TV show called Crossing Over. Huang’s mother was Mao Zedong’s English teacher. She was sent to the U.S. for an education as a teenager and returned to become one of the most influential entrepreneurs in Chinese print media.
Hung Huang is the chief executive of the China Interactive Media Group and publishes fashion magazines such as I Look, Time Out and Seventeen. Her Blog, which has an audience of about 15 million, is one of China’s most popular and continues to be one of the top five on Sina.com.
The fourth Chinese Oprah I discovered was Yang Lan, who rose to fame as the host of the Zheng Da Variety Show, which often has an audience of 200 million viewers.
In the following YouTube video clip, Yang Lan talks about how Chinese women are making their mark on China’s future.
She says the younger generation in China is turning away from television and using the Internet for entertainment and information.
If you do the math, you will discover that these four Chinese Oprahs reach an audience of about 700 million compared to America’s Oprah with an audience of seven million.
Maybe the US Oprah’s claim to fame is because she was the first Oprah and it has nothing to do with the size of the audience. Did you notice that all of these Chinese Oprahs speak excellent English? I am sure that the US Oprah doesn’t speak Mandarin.
Since the US Oprah is going off the air, you have four choices in China to take her place.
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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 Ming Dynasty was the golden age of porcelain making. Each area and/or city in China that produced porcelain had its own specialty.
Most of the porcelain products that Admiral Zheng He took on his voyages were from China’s capital of porcelain in Jingdezhen.
By the time of the Ming Dynasty, there were about 20 kilns in Jingdezhen producing porcelain for the exclusive use of the Imperial family.
However, porcelain was also produced for the common people and for trade.
Again, the process of porcelain production was similar to a modern day assembly line. Sorry, Ford.
Chinese porcelain became famous throughout the world. Merchants from all of Europe and the Middle East were doing business with China.
For example, the amount of china one nation, the Netherlands, imported came to about 16 million pieces.
While Zheng He was on his voyages, the Forbidden City, the largest palace in the world, was being built in Beijing. Classical Chinese construction involved eight separate tasks, which have changed little in thousands of years.
Jin Hongkui, Deputy Curator of the Palace Museum says, “The golden yellow tiles of the Forbidden City contain many details that might go unnoticed by a less observant eye.
“For instance, each tile on the roof of the Hall of Supreme Harmony has a miniature dragon sculpted on the tile’s head…
“These small details are a sharp contrast to the grand scale of the palace and this highlights the harmony of artistic and architectural effort that went into the Forbidden City.”
At the same time, the Temple of Heaven was being built in another part of Beijing.
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 
