The Life of Confucius – Part 1/5

May 2, 2010

Confucius was born 550 years before the birth of Jesus Christ.  Ironically, he was born into a time of war and bloodshed and his father was a fearsome warrior. Due to the father’s skills in battle, his king made him governor of Tsou, a village southeast of today’s Beijing.

Although the father had more than one wife, nine daughters and one crippled, sickly son, he was lonely. He wanted a healthy son, so at age seventy Confucius’s father took a 16-year-old concubine who gave him a healthy son, who would become the man we call Confucius. Confucius was not a pretty baby. His head looked like a hill shaped like a crown.

Confucius was not his real name. Twenty-one-hundred years after his birth, Christian missionaries would change his real name to what we know today.

Confucius was three when his father died. Jealous older wives disowned his mother. Facing starvation, mother and child traveled to a nearby city ten miles from the village. Life for Confucius and his mother was not easy and his path to wisdom was going to be hard. The suffering would cause Confucius to vow that he would bring peace to China.

Go to Part 2 of “The Life of Confucius” or hear the music of The Yangqin

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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.

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2 Comments | China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, Confucianism, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Three Hundred Years – Part 2 of 5

April 6, 2010

From Part 1, Liu Xiaobo’s last sentence, “I have my doubts as to whether 300 years would be enough.”, shows that he understands what it would take to change China’s people so they would accept a Western style government. To make this happen, China would have to be occupied by Western armies while hordes of Christian missionaries arrived to convert the population.  It would take generations to rid the culture of its Confucius Taoist influence—China’s cultural foundation.

Since the West attemped doing this during the 19th century, we already know what will happen. Tens of millions will die since there would be resistance.

Opium Poppy

During the 19th century, more than one of China’s emperors told Western representative that China had everything the empire needed and there was no need for trade with the West. This resulted in two Opium Wars started by England and France to force China to open its doors to Opium and other Western products and to allow Christian missionaries free access to convert the peasant population.

The result was catastrophic.  If it hadn’t been for World War II and Japan’s invasion of China, which cost almost forty million lives, the West might have eventually succeeded in another century or two to convert China into a Western culture as Liu Xiaobo said in Part 1 of this series.

See The Reasons Why China is Studying Singapore http://wp.me/pN4pY-2z

 

1 Comment | China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse