The Myth of China’s Queen Mother, Shi Wang Mu

July 25, 2013

To the Chinese, Hsi Wang Mu is the Queen Mother of the  West (Western China), an important figure of Chinese mythology.

It is believed that the myth of the Queen Mother goes back almost three thousand years, but the earliest recorded history was found from the Chou Dynasty (1122 – 222 BC) and was written in the second century BC.  It appears she may have been a real queen of a Western Chinese state and stories of her life become legend over hundreds of years turning into magical myths.

One of the older stories is about Hsi Wang Mu and the celestial archer, where she asks him to build her a palace of jade in the western sky. His reward was a pill made from the peaches of immortality, which ends in tragedy and heartbreak.

It is said that Hsi Wang Mu had nine sons and twenty-four daughters with her mate, Tung Wang Kung.

Discover The First Emperor – The Man Who Made China

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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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19 Comments | China, Chinese arts and music, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, Chinese literature, Chinese women, history | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Mao’s 24-hour war to cleanse China of illegal drugs

July 16, 2013

From The Opium Monopoly by Ellen N. La Motte, we learn how opium addiction became an epidemic in China. Although The Chinese knew about opium for more than a thousand years, it wasn’t until the Portuguese arrived in the 18th century that  the Chinese used it as a drug by smoking it. Merchants from Britain, France, Portugal, America and other nations became the drug cartels that plagued China into the 20th century.

In 1729, the emperor issued the first anti-opium edict, but the supply of opium flooding China went from 220 chests in 1729 to 70,000 in 1858.

It is estimated that before 1950, as many as 20 million Chinese were drug addicts. To solve this problem, Mao had the People’s Liberation Army execute the drug dealers and forced millions of addicts into compulsory treatment—all in twenty-four hours.


Opium growers, who did not want to comply, fled into the Golden Triangle Region of Southeast Asia where many of Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist troops had gone to escape defeat. Those generals also did business with the CIA, and American soldiers in Vietnam became the new customers. It is estimated that at least 20% of the almost nine million American troops that served in Vietnam became addicted.

China remained free of drugs until Deng Xiaoping declared, “Getting Rich is Glorious” and opened China to world trade. In 2003, it was estimated that China had four million regular drug users—even with China’s strict laws concerning illegal drug use.

And in America, where human rights are king, drug users and sellers often end up in prison costing taxpayers an average of $47,000 annually for each of the more than 2-million convicted criminals that are locked up explaining why America has more people serving time in prisons than any other country on the planet—that price tag is more than $90-billion a year.

Sources: Opium and Illegal Drugs in China and How Maoist Revolution Wiped Out Drugs in China

To discover more of Mao’s China, see China’s Great Leap Forward

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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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1 Comment | China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, Communism, crime, cultural differences, family values, history, legal system, military | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Pearl S. Buck’s 1966 China Predictions

July 11, 2013

Pearl S. Buck appeared on the Merv Griffin Show in 1966 and made a few predictions.

  • Buck said China will be what we make it to be. She meant that the United States will either make China its enemy or its friend.
  • Buck said the Chinese are marvelous friends and frightful enemies. If this is true, why are so many Americans and the US media demonizing China instead of cultivating friendship?
  • The Chinese have a marvelous sense of humor, Buck says. The Asian people are very human.
  • Communism will change. Buck said China will moderate and will modernize in time. She saw Communism arrive in China in 1921, and said it was an impractical, impossible scheme of life. She was right. China has changed and is now a hybrid, socialist-capitalist country with a market economy and an authoritarian, one-party (with more than 80-million members) government.

During her career as an author, Buck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel The Good Earth in 1932 and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938.

Only seven American authors have been awarded both the Pulitzer and the Nobel: Sinclair Lewis; Eugene O’Neill; Pearl S. Buck; William Faulkner; Ernest Hemingway; John Steinbeck; Saul Bellow, and Toni Morrison—five men and two women.

Pearl S. Buck was born in America (1892 – 1973) and at the age of three months went to China. Except for attending college in the United States 1911 – 1914, she lived in China until age forty

Meet Pearl S. Buck in the following mini-documentary that runs 2:14 minutes.

“She was a builder of bridges between China and the rest of the world,” says Edgar Walsh of his mother, Pearl S. Buck. 

In this mini-documentary, Walsh describes how his mother was “ideally positioned to write about China.” Buck was the daughter of missionaries and spent much of the first half of her life in China, where many of her books are set. 

What do you think of China?

Discover China: Dictatorship or One Party Republic

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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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2 Comments | America, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, Communism, history, media, politics, socialism, United States | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Printing Books in China

July 9, 2013

I read a post on another Blog that complained about printing books in China for the American market, and this was my response.

If American’s stopped buying products made in China, Americans at home would lose jobs.  Since companies like Wal-Mart have most of its products manufactured in China, Wal-Mart might go out of business or shrink—which might be a good thing.  But many low wage people that work for Wal-Mart in the United States would be unemployed like American autoworkers during the recession.

Most Chinese products are manufactured for American companies.  Most of Apple’s products are manufactured outside the country like iPods in China. Try to buy a car—any car—that’s 100% manufactured in the United States.  Does it matter where the jobs go?  They are still gone. People in India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, etc. are manufacturing goods that are sold in the United States. China isn’t the only country that does this.  Yet China seems to get all the blame. Why?

Many products may be built in other countries but an American puts them on the shelf, sells them and gets paid for it. When you buy an e-book, where is it manufactured?

Discover Doing Business in China

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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, Running with the Enemy, was awarded an honorable mention in general fiction at the 2013 San Francisco Book Festival.

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Leave a Comment » | America, business, capitalism, China, Chinese history, Chinese literature, economy, history, United States | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Meaning of the Mandate of Heaven

July 4, 2013

Due to the Mandate of Heaven, many of China’s people see rebellion as a birthright under the right circumstances. The Mandate of Heaven has been traced back to 1753 B.C. or earlier.

Click on image to make larger.

With the Mandate of Heaven, the right to rule from divine legitimization to one based on ‘evenhanded’ rule was born. Whenever a dynasty fell, the reason offered by China’s wise men was the loss of the moral right to rule given by Heaven alone—on a good government, Heaven sends down all blessings; on the evildoer Heaven sends down all miseries.

However, humans in China were free to rule unjustly and could harm the people they ruled but their rule would come to a swift end as Heaven passed its mandate to another family or group. Heaven blessed the authority of a just ruler, but would be displeased with a despotic ruler and would withdraw its mandate. In addition, severe floods or famines might be considered evidence of divine repeal of the Mandate of Heaven.

The time an individual or family or a political group like the Communists rules China is based on a fair and just performance. As long as the ruling family or party rules fairly and justly, the majority will see no need for change.

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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 lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

2015 Promotion Image for My Splendid Concubine

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China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

Leave a Comment » | China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, cultural differences, government, history | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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