Anyone else discovered the trick that when their are alternate spelling methods of foreign words, if you split the difference between the two spellings you often get closer to the correct sound than either of them.
I have been doing this for years (where possible) and feel it is often pretty successful with Asian/indigenous words.
I have noticed that in particular for the sound represented by "q" in hanyu pinyin. Wade-Giles represents it as ch', but in older representations it is commonly spelled ts (tsingtao (qingdao) beer, tsinghua (qinghua) university).
It is quite true that, to the English ear, the Mandarin sound is ambiguous between those two representations. But I'm curious how you would go about attempting to split the difference.
Another example that appears in the post is that Wade-Giles represented pinyin "r" as "j". This is easy to explain - the sound can be anywhere along the continuum between the sound of the R in "row" and the sound of the SI in "vision", and I assume J was picked to represent that second sound, possibly with an eye toward French.
But while pinyin "q" is a case of an intermediate sound, pinyin "r" isn't really. Every point on the continuum is a legitimate pronunciation of the Mandarin sound; what you get will differ from speaker to speaker and even from utterance to utterance holding the speaker constant.
Except that Pinyin is now the official rendering of Putonghua in Latin script. All translations going forward will be in Pinyin. All serious Western scholarship is being rendered in Pinyin.
I never understood what I was supposed to do with those apostrophes ('). Supposedly they are aspirations, but once I started learning Putonghua, I could not see any correlation between the WG spellings and the Beijing way of pronunciation. At least with Pinyin and its tonal notations, one can figure out how the word should be pronounced (once you've got 4 tones for each vowel sound down, and all those subtle frictives in Beijing-style Putonghua mastered).
Why should we care? “Rome” is Roma. “Cologne” is Köln. Beijing can be called whatever the Chinese want in China. Here in the US, we should use a romanization designed for Americans, not whatever happens to be official over there.
But “Beijing” is what the Chinese want it called in China, being the pinyin romanization of 北京! “Peking” is the older English name, borrowed from a Portuguese transliteration, and that sees relatively little use now except when in relation to things still associated with the older name like Peking Duck.
Come to think of it, I‘m not sure why I wrote this comment…
Americans should just use the Yale romanization system, which was actually designed so that Americans can pronounce something reasonable close to correct by just reading it. Under no circumstances should pinyin be used with a generalist American reading audience. It’s a great romanization system—for people who speak Mandarin. Everyone who speaks English but not Mandarin should use Yale.
"Maybe in some alternate universe a Ming-era person discovers that lightning can be tamed like fire - would that have helped? I’m not aware of any experiments with electricity, though they did have gunpowder and printing presses. "
They were not ready for a scientific revolution. At this point the Chinese believed the earth was flat and they didn't even have Euclidean geometry. Not that they weren't smart! They were highly intelligent, it's just they didn't have the cultural apparatus for scientific investigation. A good example is Chinese astronomy. Right around this time period Chinenese astronomy was a state monopoly conducted by the Bureau of Mathematics and Astronomy, under the Ministry of Rites. It was part of the Ministry of Rites because the sole purpose of Astronomy was to prepare an annual calendar that identified lucky and unlucky days. The calendar's primary purpose is to establish the days certain rites will occur on. Astronomer's studied the stars so they could predict the equinoxes and eclipses so that rites would happen at the right time.
In 1603 the Chinese scholar Xu Guanqi converts to Christianity under the influence of his friend Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit priest who came to China as a missionary. Ricci has been sharing western knowledge with Xu, and together they decide to translate all of western science into Chinese. By 1610 they've published translations explaining geometry, Ptolemaic astronomy (not the best science, but at least the Earth is a sphere and the math works), and other odds and ends. Note that this is still 1610 and the scientific revolution is just kicking off in Europe: all Xu is doing is trying to get China caught up with Europe's mathematical and astronomical knowledge circa 500 AD or so.
Xu challenges the Chinese astronomers to a face off to prove which system is better, with the Jesuits making their own calendar to compare to the Chinese calendar. The Jesuit calendar is so much more accurate than the Bureau's that the Emperor grants Xu permission to translate and publish the remainder of Western science into Chinese. A Jesuit priest returns to Europe to recruit more astronomer-missionaries and collect books of science.
So what happens from there? What happens is the eunuchs and other bureaucrats get pissed off at some rando showing up and rocking the boat (and tradition! The Earth is a sphere? How radical!). The Minister of Rites manages to put the Jesuit missionaries on trial for disparaging Chinese rites. Though none are executed, many are banished and the rest stop publicly spreading scientific knowledge and try to keep their nose clean. In 1619 the priest they sent to get more books arrives with 7,000 of them, plus something special: a brand new telescope! While all this was happening in China the telescope was invented, spread across Europe, and was being used to make amazing new astronomical discoveries. The moons of Jupiter! The transit of Venus! Craters on the moon! It's a big moment, and China has just received this state of the art invention from across the world.
Of course, the Chinese won't let him in because the Jesuits are persona-non-grata with the bureaucracy right now. He sneaks in anyway, and by 1622 court politics have shifted enough that the Jesuits are back in business. They set up shop and by 1626 have published a Chinese treatise on the telescope and all the cool discoveries that have already been made with it. Wang Cheng publishes "Diagrams and Explanation of the Marvelous Devices of the Far West" where he expounds on the telescope and its value for navigation, warfare, astronomy, etc. One difficulty is that the Chinese do not have the technical skill to grind glass lenses, and have no science of optics. Still, the knowledge is here and there are people excited to spread it.
In 1629 another showdown is held, this time with the task of predicting when the next day's solar eclipse will occur. The Jesuit astronomers predict the start time and duration down to the minute, while the Bureau of Calendar's is off on the start by an hour and the duration by almost two hours. The Emperor is impressed enough to put Xu in charge of a Calendar Reform Project. The Jesuits translate more works on state-of-the art astronomy from letters they receive from Europe: they publish books on Tycho's model of the solar system, and in 1632 they use Tycho's system to predict the conjunction of Mars and Venus. The old Chinese system is off by eight days. The current leader of the Jesuit astronomer-priests, Schall, is appointed the head of the Bureau of Calendars.
So at this point China has all the knowledge it needs to kick off a scientific revolution, the kind that is happening simultaneously in Europe. The trouble is that they don't have the cultural institutions for it. They have the fuel, they have the spark, but there's no oxygen in the room.
The Imperial Bureaucracy is against this whole project from the get go, and the only thing that holds them back is the Emperor's support. When the Emperor dies in 1664 the new Emperor is told by his officials that the Calendar Reform project is just an excuse to propagate Christianity, upset tradition, and destabilize China. Schall is accused of creating calendars that cause state rites to occur at inauspicious times, leading to the death of the previous Emperor. The project heads are imprisoned. Schall is sentenced to death by dismemberment and the rest of his group are sentenced to exile after flogging. The sentence is commuted to house arrest after the princess dowager intervenes on their behalf, but the project is dead. The Jesuits are thrown out and the Chinese officials who worked for them are beheaded for treason. An anti-western official who has no knowledge of mathematics or astronomy is chosen as the new head of the Bureau of Calendars. They return to the old methods for the most part, choosing tradition over accuracy.
This isn't the last battle: in 1669 the Jesuits hold a new series of face offs against the Bureau, winning each one. The new Emperor becomes interested in western science, but doesn't do much about it and his successor has no interest whatsoever.
Meanwhile in Europe the scientific revolution is a wildfire that can't be stopped.
I know this is an overlong comment, but I find it very interesting. As far as I can tell it is the institutions and cultural ideas that made the difference. In China astronomy was only done by the Imperial Bureaucracy, and was subject to bureaucratic politics. Tradition and stability was valued much higher than the pursuit of knowledge or competence: I mean, look what happened to that General in the book review, he was highly competent but died penniless because he might have caused instability. In Europe knowledge wasn't controlled by the state but by the universities. Decentralized and independent they were able to pass on knew knowledge rapidly and weren't beholden to concerns about stability. People were sharing discoveries left and right, building their own telescopes, publishing papers about what they found, having debates about the implications. The telescope was invented in 1608, and by 1610 Galileo has already published "The Starry Messenger", by 1611 Kepler has invented an improved telescope, and soon every astronomer in Europe has one. At the same time that China is throwing the Jesuits out of the Bureau and going back a flat earth model, Isaac Newton is crafting the first reflecting telescope.
All that to say, China was well suited to thousands of years of stability and completely unsuited for a scientific revolution.
Interestingly, I believe that Chinese astronomers had noted that the angle to the sun is different at different points on earth. But since they believed the earth was flat, rather than a sphere, they didn’t do the calculation Eratosthenes did to find the circumference of the earth, but instead used the base of a triangle and its two angles to calculate what they thought was the distance to the sun.
Thanks for the link. Reading it also drove something else home for me: the Jesuits in 1600 couldn't have been the first time the Chinese were exposed to the idea that the world is a sphere. They directly traded with plenty of Arab, Persian, and Indian cultures that knew the world was round. It reminds me of the Macartney Embassy to China in 1793: they tried to impress the Chinese with Western inventions and trade goods, but they were viewed as barbarians (like every other nation outside the Empire) and were snubbed. The Emperor sent a letter to King George III stating "Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce." That same attitude must have prevented outside scientific ideas from catching on in China from trade.
The letter is definitely worth a read, by the way. It's dripping with condescension.
That’s not how I read that thread. I read it as Cochran insisting that Mayans didn’t know astronomy, because he claimed they didn’t know the earth was a sphere, but not providing any reason to think the Mayans didn’t know the earth was a sphere.
I don’t know who that guy (Cochran) is, but to be fair to him, the consensus view is that the Mayans thought our world was a plane—maybe an infinite plane.
They had really comprehensive astronomical records as everyone knows, but even though that can give you a strong predictive power and sophisticated calendar, it doesn’t mean you have a strong underlying grasp of what’s happening mechanically in the heavens: just like the Chinese, in this instance.
Cochran was responding to a claim that some Amerindians (later to be specified as Mayans) not merely knew astronomy but were "hundreds of years ahead of “western civilization”" in both that & mathematics.
Yeah, that strikes me as a claim that is unverifiable and unfalsifiable, rather than false. There's surely many individual bits of understanding that each culture had that the others wouldn't have for centuries.
I would guess that in the specific field of mathematics, western Europeans really were far ahead of anyone outside of the Old World. There was no mathematics the Amerindians knew about that Europeans didn't.
> In Europe knowledge wasn't controlled by the state but by the universities.
Another oft-repeated explanation of the same phenomenon is to give credit to Europe having several states, all competing with each other. The state with a navy that didn't adopt a useful thing like telescope would be seriously disadvantaged. To take an example related to calendars and the 1580s, there was a period when the Gregorian calendar was adopted non-uniformly: pious non-Catholic monarchs made a great show of not adopting the Popist invention ... except until the discrepancy with the calendar months and the reality became increasingly embarrassing. The Russian empire most famously was a hold-out, which is why the October Revolution happened in November ...
True! When the telescope was first invented the Dutch state tried to keep it a secret for military purposes. That didn't work at all, and within the year you have Galileo making his own.
Interesting, a longer comment might have included the effect of the protestant rebellion on the flourishing (in some cases) and suppression (in others) of knowledge in post-medieval Europe.
This is an excellent comment, and I think your conclusions are more or less correct, only I doubt very much the core issue was cultural ideas, tradition or stability. Rather, the problem was, as usual, greedy shitheads. The literal dickless wonders running the show didn't really take exception to some calendrical quibble which, as you note yourself, they couldn't be bothered to even learn about; they took exception to a decrease in their own power. They hated being shown up by upstarts, and worse, by some foreign barbarian ones! If these new guys gain power in the machine, then someone else must lose it, and there's nobody else around but the null brigade; they might not be destabilizing China, but they're sure as fuck destabilizing the eunuchs' cushy setup. They couldn't care less about China if they tried anyway, as evidenced by their conduct.
The only problem here that can be imputed to tradition is the specific tradition of keeping all these career academics around in positions of power, which is something that ought to alarm the conscientious observer of modern America.
I think this is basically right, but overestimates the eunuch problem and underestimates the bureaucrat problem.
All the bureaucrats are chosen based on a system that boils down to competitive essay-writing, with all the essays on a handful of classics and written in a specific format. One result is that your whole elite, while theoretically drawn from the whole country, is selected to be a very specific type of person. A worse result is that all the excess capacity of elites is sunk into a zero-sum essay-writing game. There's no slack in the system - anyone who takes time to learn about the universe will get outcompeted by someone who used that time to read more Confucius. The result is the same thing we're starting to have - a 2-dimensional elite who are very good at the test we use to select them, but totally devoid of all other merits.
In Europe, by contrast, most of society was still largely hereditary, and the lack of competition resulted in a large number of people with mounds of resources who can do whatever they liked. Most of them just ate and hunted, but some of them advanced civilisation. What competition there was boiled down to getting the monarch to like you (for which novelty, and patronising arts and culture, was a decent strat), or getting other aristocrats to think you're cool (ditto). This then creates a market for secondary industries like lens grinders.
The Eunuchs should be a countervailing force, and possibly sometimes were (Zheng He) but the Chinese opinion generally was that they were too venial. They were also basically servants, so didn't have their own independent wealth/power base to start doing cool experiments.
Interestingly, this isn't something where we've coincidentally fallen for the same trap as the Chinese. The British East India Company saw the Chinese system, loved it, and copied it. Then the British copied it from the EIC as Travelyanism. Then the old American Progressives (Teddy Roosevelt and co) copied the British and introduced it to America (the Pendleton Act). That then metastasised into the idea of meritocracy, soaked into the fabric of American thought, and was shipped back to Europe with the GIs. Which I guess gives the Chinese a fitting revenge for the Opium wars or something.
I think there are also parliamentary debates on the Northcote-Travelyan reforms where some of the Tories predict what will happen with reference to China stagnating, but Hansard's search function isn't working for me today
Interesting how people often warn about the dangers of too much STEM education and not enough humanities, and yet we have a historical example of an opposite extreme.
I'm not sure how you equate the limited curriculum of the Chinese exam system with the modern study of the humanities, unless your categorisation is that all non-STEM subjects are by definition humanities. Done properly, humanities is a thinking education, encouraging challenging orthodoxies (it isn't always done well). I don't see a system based around what was in effect a system of showing adherence to a prescribed set of texts as humanities so much as a form of demonstrating adherence to a belief system, so I don't think we can define the Chinese competitive exams as humanities, and we might be better defining it as a way of recruiting a priesthood.
It's really similar to the old literae humaniores courses you still get at a few places (possibly just Oxford), but with Confucius instead of Virgil. Modern humanities courses are derived from it, but in dumbed down and in English.
Showing adherence to a prescribed set of texts is also the entirety of a humanities course - you're given a set of books to read then you write essays about them.
Possibly for literary studies, but that clearly doesn't apply to history or philosophy where texts are starting points for investigation. And you won't get a top grade in a humanities programme by simply demonstrating knowledge of the texts and their accepted interpretation; it's about displaying thought and research skills as well. At base, a good university education in any subject is to prepare students to ask the question 'what happens if I do this?'.
I'm not saying there are not badly-taught courses where faithfullness to the text and the prescribed ideology for interpreting it is required. But that is not modern humanities any more than the Ming-period competitive examination.
I once knew a fellow of Chinese extraction who liked to theorize that so many generations of putting priority on writing essays might not have been effective governance but may have resulted in the higher average Chinese IQ. (He drew a parallel to the Jewish IQ and the history of prioritizing study of the Torah.) I did not quibble with him then, and I present this defense of this type of education without comment.
It's potentially viable, but the killer stat is whether mandarin fertility/child mortality was higher or lower than the rest of the population. Although (taking this and running speculatively with it), didn't China used to have a lot of famines? That could presumably increase Mandarin fitness if they and their children were more likely to survive them than peasants were.
Also, are the Chinese smarter than the Japanese? Otherwise that's a hint that it's something else, as the Japanese were feudal (albeit stereotypically with a lot more strategy and scheming than their Teutonic counterparts).
The SAT is pretty much an IQ test, so has pretty much the opposite result - it selects for smart people.
The idea that the meritocracy is bad is one of those provocative ideas that is quite wrong on examining it for about five minutes. It yields much better results.
There's a reason why meritocratic countries advance so much faster than more primitive, backwards ones.
The key is actually operating mostly on merit and not other things that people try to substitute for merit.
China was a meritocracy, and Europe wasn’t, at the time Europe overtook China. Realistically, the Imperial examination boils down to the effort you put in plus how smart you are. The current education system in the West is the same, plus varying degrees of corruption.
If you chose the leadership of a country purely by IQ, then up to any point well into the 60s you’d end up with a Communist country. The same would apply to more conventional meritocracy, but that at least has the advantage of filtering out the weird ones, which would be the real danger of the IQ-only system; you’d end up with half the budget going towards anime.
Empirically, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that meritocracy produces better results than either democracy of the hereditary principle.
Secondly, China wasn't a meritocracy. It didn't select for people who were best at leading. That is what meritocracy IS - it is about having merit at the thing you do, not in some ethereal sense. This is precisely why capitalism works so well - you are rewarded by generating value for other people.
People who think "merit" is just about raw IQ aren't living in reality. IQ makes you more able to posses actually useful forms of merit, but IQ itself doesn't actually mean anything - it doesn't matter how smart you are if you spend all your time navel gazing or engaging in other useless or frivolous activity.
The reason why IQ tests can be useful is because they let you find the people who have the highest ability cap. But simply giving people IQ tests is not sufficient to determine merit at a particular job or occupation, because lots of other things are involved in merit as well. In the end, the person with the highest IQ is not necessarily the person with the most merit, and indeed, it is not uncommon for the person with the most merit not to be the highest IQ person but the person with fairly high IQ but very high diligence and thus willingness to hone skills beyond the point of diminishing returns.
I agree with the capitalism point, but do western bureaucracies select for people who are best at leading? Despite the popular Rotschild-related conspiracy theories, the most successful capitalists don't in fact wield most of the power.
1) They were until Communism actually started to fail, even though most other people weren't convinced.
2) This version of meritocracy (the best person to do the job should do the job) is too vague to be meaningful as it can't be operationalised. The person who thinks the best leaders will be produced by taking children of current leaders and raising them from birth to be confident and decisive enough to rule and the person who thinks the best leaders will be produced by sending the people with the best SATs to Harvard, then having them work at McKinsey for a bit before becoming congressional staffers are both "meritocrats."
"Meritocracy" meaning "the people who should lead us are the people who are best at leading" is question-begging bordering on tautology. Actual meritocracy, both in the view of the man who coined it and every time it's now used, means selecting leaders/functionaries/bureaucrats through competitive examination, which is the Imperial Chinese system. There's an element of motte-and-bailey between the two definitions now that it's not just a term of abuse, but most people understand it to mean the current Western system but shorn of it's plutocratic skew.
The European "scientific revolution" of the 16th and 17th Centuries that you're talking about was largely a revolution in entrepreneurial alchemy. The flood of silver from the Spanish conquest was upsetting economies all over Europe, causing extreme inflation—and especially in Central Europe, where the older metal economies of Central European kingdoms were being disrupted—rulers started hiring alchemists to produce gold. It turned out that silver thalers had enough gold in them that could be extracted to make the first wave of entrepreneurial alchemists seem rather successful! Of course, a lot of the alchemists were total failures (and many of them were executed as charlatans). But that led to more explicit contracts (which led to the development of contract law across Europe—without which a modern economy can't run). And rulers also invested in mining technology to more efficiently extract metals (and the alchemists were there helping out with the process of metal refining).
With tight finances in an inflationary economy, rulers would sometimes sell stock in these mining and metallurgical enterprises to fund them. Thus the modern corporation as owned by stockholders evolved alongside the boom in entrepreneurial alchemy (again spurring along the European economy). There are pictures from that period depicting large factories with hundreds of workers toiling over refining equipment. Many of these became something like research labs, where once they gave up on the pipe dreams of transmutation, they started exploiting secondary technologies that had practical uses—such as the reliable production of potassium nitrate (which was used in older alchemical experiments, but which found a new use in the burgeoning firearms industry of the time). And lest you think I'm exaggerating the importance of the early alchemical entrepreneurs on the development of a modern European economy and sciences, remember that during this period the people we now consider to be scientific luminaries—such as Newton and Boyle—regarded themselves as alchemists. Most of Newton's notebooks are alchemical in nature. Calculus and the law of gravity were just some ideas that he tossed off along the way in his search for Van Helmont's alchahest (sort of a universal alchemical solvent). As a reference, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire by Pamela H. Smith, is well worth reading.
Anyway, China didn't have the destabilizing influx of New World silver, and its rulers didn't have to adapt to a vast inflationary cycle disrupting their ordered economies. Likewise, as far I as I can tell Chinese alchemists were only interested in creating life-extending elixirs, and the only gold they were obsessed with was the false gold that was the basis of their elixir theory. (Whatever false gold was, I don't know.)
Alchemy was certainly relevant for some of the things that came later (notably Boyle and Lavoisier and Dalton’s work that turned the earth and fire elemental system upside down) but I would have thought that Galileo and Kepler and Copernicus, not to mention Vesalius and other claimed starting points of the Scientific Revolution, were somewhat independent of alchemy.
Lee Smolin in his book, Time Reborn, regards Leibnitz as being the first philosopher/scientist to start thinking about the cosmos in a new theoretical way—one that was unconnected to the mechanistic clockwork universe that was inherited from Aristotelian predecessors. Smolin argues that Leibnitz saw time to be a function of the nature of the universe, rather than something that was outside and separate from Newton's clockwork universe. Einstein may have been influenced by Leibnitz when he formulated General Relativity (speculation).
But if we were to look for the origin of the experimental method, I think that would be with the 11th Century's Ibn al-Haytham who was the first to connect the Greek idea of a hypothesis with the process of reproducible experimentation to confirm the hypothesis. So I would qualify Ibn al-Haytham as the world's first scientist—in the modern definition of science. I think there was some argument a while back about whether Newton read an early translation of al Haytham's treatise on optics, but I'm kind of vague about the details.
Not that Kepler and Galileo didn't provide significant stepping stones in the understanding of our cosmos, but even though today we consider them to be early astronomers, they would have seen themselves working in the traditions of astrology and a calendrical knowledge. After all, why did kings and potentates fund the work of our early "astronomers"? They wanted a better way of predicting future events (i.e. astrology).
Lol! I knew I'd provoke a strong response from some of ACX folks!
The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire by Pamela H. Smith, is well worth reading. Next year I'll do a book report on it.
I would also direct you to Newton's notebooks. Just looking over the first 50 entries in the catalog of his notes and notebooks, 47 are about subjects related to alchemy and hermetic knowledge. Newton's primary intellectual occupation was alchemy. The stuff we remember him for was but a small part of what he was about.
Here are some links to pics of some 16th and 17th Century alchemical enterprises. As you can see, alchemical labs were common enough for contemporary artists to depict them, and they display all the signs of a top-down organizational structure, as well as evidence of extensive logistical organization — after all a significant number of craft workers were involved in the creation of the devices that they were using (a holdover of these craft guilds would be the glassblowers who staffed 20th Century chemistry labs). Also, it would take a significant input of capital to fund these projects. So what we're seeing in these pictures are the first organized experimental enterprises whose ultimate goal was to create value from experimental knowledge.
I am not saying the connections made are wrong. It’s that the connections aren’t “the difference”, and that there are 50 other series of connections you could make.
But China has suffered from inflation far before anyone else, with their invention of Fiat currency hundreds of years before it happened in the West. I think this is too narrow of a view of Science (to bring it down only to Alchemy) and while this is an interesting perspective, I do not think it explains the full, or even the majority of the differences.
I don't know about the fiat currencies of China. Do you have some links?
However, Europe did have a lot of competing states—which China did not—except in interregnums between dynasties. The competitive political pressures during an inflationary era and the threat of the Ottomans Empire on Central European states may have made spurred new economic models as well as research into things that states would find of practical use. Bacon opined that "science" was about the creation of useful things, and he disparaged wasting time on theory if it wasn't towards of goal of utility.
Bacon did do that for sure, but can we hold it against him that way back then he did not know that almost all theoretical research will turn out to be practical too - something people today do not know.
> Anyway, China didn't have the destabilizing influx of New World silver, and its rulers didn't have to adapt to a vast inflationary cycle disrupting their ordered economies
I thought the opposite. The Ming had a massive inflationary problem with their paper money, and the Philippines was basically jointly colonized by Chinese merchants and the Spanish to exchange Mexican silver (high demand in China) for goods like like silk and porcelain.
Amazing comment - I lived across from Xu Guanqi's park, house and museum, and I loved to spend time there. He was, in his acceptance but also cleverness, ahead of his time, and it is a shame that the system around him was not made to accept his ideas. In his area of town, Xujiahui, still a Catholic church stands, a remnant of those times, and quite beautiful even to my atheist eyes. Still, history is repeating itself and the church is often closed and its existence is uncertain in the future due to the prime location it takes up.
Anyhow, thank you for the tale, more detailed than the one I knew, about Xu.
It's a great story, but I don't think it supports your conclusion.
The fact that X didn't happen in China doesn't mean it *couldn't* happen in China; the fact that X did happen in Europe doesn't mean that it was particularly or more likely to happen in Europe.
Consider this possibility: that in fact there was approximately a 50:50 chance that a scientific revolution would happen in China in the 1600s; and the same chance that one would happen in Europe. The coins were tossed, and as luck has it, Europe came up heads, China tails. If this is true, then looking in the tea leaves of Chinese history for why it came up tails is useless. It was just a historical happenstance.
Now I haven't given any evidence for this, only a just-so story. But I think accepting that some things are down to chance is a much better starting point than going into the study of history determined to find the reasons why X.
The Chinese divide the sky into four houses, as we would cut an apple into four pieces, each with an ancient symbolic animal: the Canglong for the East and Spring, the Vermilion Bird for the South and Summer, the White Tiger for the West and Autumn, and the Xuanwu (or "gloomy warrior") for the North and Winter. The northern arch of the polar region, which immediately surrounds the Emperor's pole star, is considered to be a separate central yellow palace in a similar symbolic relationship to the five elements. This view of the five elements permeates the entire Chinese philosophy of nature. In addition, there is a more important division of the heavens than this.
Since ancient times, the Chinese equator (as opposed to the ecliptic) has been divided into 28 parts, called the 28 constellations (lunar stations), with seven constellations in each house, each of which is marked by a special constellation, counting from a particular fixed star (distance star), so that each constellation occupies a very different equatorial area. The circles of time separating the constellations radiate out from the celestial pole, like a network of orange petals in the sky, with some constellations located above the equator and others distributed north and south of it.
Chinese astronomy has a long history of development. By the Han Dynasty, there were already schools of thought such as Gai Tian, Xuan Yi and Hun Tian. According to Gai Tian, the sky is like a lid, and the center of the lid is the north pole. XuanYi said that the sky has no fixed shape and the sun, moon and stars "float naturally in the void" and are not attached to the "heavenly body". The Huntian says that the sky is like an egg shell and the earth is like the yolk of an egg, and that the sky and the earth stand on air and carry water.
"When the Emperor dies in 1664 the new Emperor is told by his officials that the Calendar Reform project is just an excuse to propagate Christianity, upset tradition, and destabilize China."
I don't know about destabilizing tradition, but the Jesuits were missionaries. No matter their good intentions, they did wish to propagate Christianity, and upset tradition in the meantime.
What I'm getting at here is just that the accusations against them weren't exactly false. I don't know if we can infer anything about the Chinese readiness to accept new technology, because the story seems completely explainable by hostility to foreign religion and culture. Hardly unique to the Chinese.
I agree, that the spread of Christianity in China would upset tradition. But so would the spread of new ideas in general! If the concern was the spread of Christianity alone, then keep the translated books and kick out the missionaries. They had proven multiple times by that point that the Ptolemaic (and by this time Tychonic) system worked better than the Chinese system. Yet when they kicked out the Jesuits they didn't replace them with a traditional Chinese official using the new knowledge, they replaced them with a traditional Chinese official using the traditional Chinese method.
Take in contrast Europe, which was still reeling from it's own religious upsetting of tradition: the Protestant Reformation. That movement certainly brought significant amounts of instability and war: it practically tore Europe apart (the 30 years war kicked of in 1618, remember). Hans Lippershey (the inventor of the telescope) was a Protestant: yet Catholic Galileo still used his invention. Tycho and Kepler were Protestants, yet that didn't stop Catholic astronomers from using Tycho's tables and adopting Kepler's ellipses. The Pope censured Galileo and banned books on heliocentrism, and yet that didn't stop European (even most Catholic) astronomers from using heliocentric systems in their work.
I think the primary difference is that there was no institution in Europe that was capable of stopping the spread of new scientific knowledge, and at least one institution (the university system) that actively encouraged the spread. That second part is important: I'm sure the Emperor didn't care much whether common folk believed the Earth was round or flat, but without independent institutions of education where new ideas were rewarded with prestige, who was going to bother to debate it?
Tangential, but important. Re. "Probably the biggest thing I learned is that human history is little more than 5000 years of gang war": This is a common complaint about humanity, but unjust. I think we should rephrase it as, "The history we've chosen to write is little more than 5000 years of gang war." Taking that as your baseline for human nature is like basing your expectations about life on Hollywood blockbusters. Only in the past 30 years have historians begun to look at the everyday life of ordinary people, which makes up the vast majority of human history.
True. My grandfather lived for 88 years, but if you asked me about him the first thing that would come to mind was that he fought in WWII. That was just two years of his 88 year life, which was primarily spent in peaceful work and loving parenting. It's just not as interesting to talk about.
It’s not interesting to *him* to talk about. But I really would be much more interested in knowing about what we’re the differences in daily life between someone living in 1500s China and someone living in 1700s Europe and someone living in 1200s Tenochtitlan than knowing who killed whom on which battlefield.
I agree, I wish there were more works about "years of no significance", where you could see what life was like at such-and-such a place and such-and-such a time when there isn't tremendous upheaval.
I didn't know Herodotus wrote in 1990! Thanks for the tip. I'd heard that the Iliad and Odyssey were a concoction of the 1970's. Herodotus being a 90's phenomenon makes sense in that context.
You're right that the OP certainly overstates the murder monkey take on history. But it's a hook, and hooks indicate the type of fish wished for. And we, my friend, are loose fish.
I suppose you're talking about the parts of book 2 about the Egyptians. Fair enough. But it's only about 1/10th of the Histories, which are mostly about wars, the histories of noble families, and legends.
Herodotus includes ethnographic details about virtually all the peoples mentioned in the Histories. I'm not sure what percentage is ethnography vs. wars vs. noble families vs. legends (which, given the Classical Greek mindset, can't be clearly delineated from ethnography anyway), but it's definitely much more than 10% (heck, the Egyptian section alone is more than 10%).
As a holder of a PhD in history awarded 20 years ago, think this statement about historians only looking at everyday life in the last thirty years is demonstrably wrong. The Annales school of historians have had a consistent focus on everyday life and using this as bottom-up history for almost 80 years, based on earlier research by scholars such as Bloch, and there was a similar strand of Soviet historical research (cynically, because it was the only area where one could ignore Marx but produce acceptable results). Less focusedly, even the great patrician English historians of the early-twentieth century, the A.J.P. Taylor and F.M. Stenton types, were producing work on lived experience alongside other historical narratives. I don't know American historiography well enough to say for certain that social history was a norm in the early-mid-twentieth century, but if be rather surprised if it wasn't. It certainly isn't an innovation of the 1990s anyway.
You may be commenting on popular history here, which might be more true (there were popular books looking at everyday life for the millennium of Domesday Book in 1986 but that's not way off your 30 years), but it seems a bit odd to say historians, whose primary outputs are academic papers and monographs, are not studying something because the companies that produce popular history don't publish books in those areas. Commissioning editors are not historians.
But... what would you estimate is the fraction of peer-reviewed history articles published since 2000 which focused on the lives of ordinary people, divided by the fraction of such articles published before 1960 (not counting studies of societies which left no evidence of a ruling class)? If that ratio is more than 10, then my statement may not be True-with-a-capital-T, but is still basically correct.
I never meant there were literally no such articles earlier, only that there's been a very marked increase in them. And 1990 isn't a hard line, but was my attempt to pick out the inflection point in the sigma curve describing the fraction of attention historians pay to the lower classes. You should read it not as if it were in the context of claiming priority on a new discovery, but in the context of being a qualitative description of what you expect to find in a history journal today versus many years ago. I stated it in simple terms to avoid writing this very paragraph.
I would have said there is an inflection point that begins with the Annales' school. But having read several 19th century books, it's not like social history and individual life were ignored in earlier history research. There is definitely a lot more clout given to social history today, given that the medieval history textbook I teach from has been gutted some of my preferred political and economic material and replaced it with additional social history, which, while extremely valuable does not fit within the goals of my intro course. The correct view is boring: social history has more clout within the academy today than it did in the past, but that doesn't mean social history was ignored and irrelevant among previous generations.
I agree with John here, that social history is not a new field, but it is currently receiving more focus, although I suspect that other than in specific sub-disciplines such as agricultural history this may have peaked.
I'd date this increased focus from the 1970s though, where it seems to the in with the postmodernist turn. So you're not wrong, but perhaps missing the backstory in your original comment.
You may also be correct on the ratio of articles, but as I have a view that modern articles have a lower bar to cross to get published (this doesn't mean they're worse mind you) due to more opportunities to do so, I'm not sure this would be statistically meaningful.
>Only in the past 30 years have historians begun to look at the everyday life of ordinary people, which makes up the vast majority of human history.
I know this to be false, for I've read March Bloch's "The Feodal Society", which was published in 1939 (so not in the last 30, but the last 80+ years), and ot was, except for the first chapter (which relates to the "gang wars" that threatened Europe in the early middle age), entirely dedicated to the organization of society, it's judicial rules, it's way to handle contracts, how social classes gained or lost privileges or burdens, etc etc.
The big problem with history and books regarding history of the World, is that the authors very often don't even know the language/ languages of the era or region.
5 thousands years of gang wars it's a description which ' fit' perfectly within Western culture, especially in those countries where English is the only known language ( plus maybe another one or two, used by minorities).
That's like quoting Dostoevsky without reading his works in Russian language.
You can watch ' Throne in blood ' by Akira Kurosawa and after few minutes you recognise Shakespeare's work but rarely can you translate papers, sources, books, you name it from other languages into English without losing the main 'spirit '.
I wish I could read more books about the history of different countries around the World written by authors who rely on their own researches based on solid knowledge of the original language/ languages.
Your parentheses beside the English being the only known language immediately hilights the problems with that statement, particularly that you previously said 5000 years of gang violence. English isn’t a old language and is relatively new to Britain. Do we really have to read Dostoevsky in Russian? Maybe for the language but not the themes.
<i>English isn’t a old language and is relatively new to Britain.</i>
Huh? English has been spoken in Britain for over 1500 years. Even if you only count modern English as "proper" English, that's still 500 years, which is (as far as I can tell) pretty much normal for European languages.
Old English is clearly not German, as they come from different branches of the West Germanic languages. Old English is the most extremely-different from Old High German of the West Germanic languages, possibly because there's no actual evidence for it being spoken in proximity as it is only recorded in Britain. It's clearly English though in that much of the language we type here is derived from it.
A major theme which either Mr. Huang or the reviewer has overlooked is that the role of Emperor in China is more significantly about unification and preservation of same than temporal power per se.
Just as a king in a feudal structure is ultimately beneficial in adjudicating between the feudal lords at last resort - the Emperor of China is intended to be the focal point upon which Chinese unity is preserved. This is why concepts like the "mandate of Heaven" are important: failure in the form of rebellion or mass suffering as precondition to rebellion are signs that an Emperor is failing in his most basic function. OF course, in reality the size and sheer scale of China in the pre-computer, pre-electrical communications era required devolution of execution of policy; the Hanlin examinations and the Imperial Bureaucracy was created to try and enable extension of Imperial policies to the far-flung corners of China.
If you look at the efforts by certain governors during the late Qing dynasty to build modern industry, for example, in the face of overall higher level bureaucratic indifference - it gives an idea of how such a ponderous bureaucratic beast operates.
But then again, it shouldn't be surprising that a scion of the post-Qing revolutionaries should denigrate the regime that was overthrown - especially since the "democratic" governments of China succeeding the Qing were notable primarily for failing both to improve Chinese society and economy as well as to preserve China's unity.
> I’ll also include the Pinyin version in parentheses where the spelling of the Wade-Giles version is significantly different, like this: Peking (Beijing).
But the Wade-Giles version of 北京 is not significantly different from beijing. It's pei-ching. The name "Peking" has nothing to do with Wade-Giles.
> His personal name combined the characters for “joy” and “king.”
It seems like it would have been incredibly disruptive for such common characters (樂王? Maybe 喜王?) to fall under the imperial name taboo. Particularly in the case of 王, which is now and was then one of the most common surnames in China.
Checking Wikipedia, I see that the Wanli Emperor's name was 翊鈞. Neither character has any sense remotely related to joy or kings. I don't see any mention in the wikipedia article that he changed his name upon taking the throne, though this was done by other emperors if they felt their name would be too disruptive.
What happened here? What name are you referring to?
The second character has the “jun1” sound and is sound/tone as 君, which does mean monarch. A similar explanation exists for the first character 翊, which sounds like 怡 and does mean joy/happy
It sounds like you're suggesting that Wanli was one of the emperors who substituted homophones into his name upon ascending the throne, in order to lessen the burden on everyone else, and wikipedia just isn't mentioning it.
But I don't think that's actually a possibility. All male members[1] of the Ming imperial family were legally required to have names that conformed to the system established by the first Ming emperor. The first character of their name was taken from a generation poem (normal for any classy Chinese family), and the second one included a radical from the 五行, with the radicals progressing through a conventional sequence generation by generation. (As far as I know, this elaboration on the scheme was unique to the Ming imperial family, but I don't know a lot.)
And here are some of the personal names of the Wanli Emperor's brothers:
翊釴
翊鈴
翊鏐
It looks painfully clear that the poem character for Wanli's generation was 翊, not 怡, and the element radical for his generation was 金, which is present in 鈞, but not in 君. He couldn't legally have been named 怡君.
It's possible there was some concept called 怡君 and the Wanli emperor was named 翊鈞 in reference to that. On the other hand, the 汉语大词典 has no entry for 怡君.
[1] Judging by the names of the princesses, they used a generation character in their names too, but not the same one that the boys used. They did not use 五行 radicals - they all seem to have used 女 radicals in the second character of their name. I don't know whether this was also required or just felt to make sense.
Nicely done, Mr. Watts. I didn't know that interesting fact about the "five force" tradition in Ming imperial names. A small correction, really to Julien's idea: 翊 (yì) and 怡 (yí) were and are not homonyms, even though a modern English reader might understandably think they were.
You aren’t wrong, I was merely suggesting a possibility of how the author got “joy king” from WanLi’s name. Who knows until the author themselves explain
A couple of points. The reviewer is clearly not familiar with Chinese or Chinese history, so there are quite a few mistakes of this kind. (For example, "Nurhaci is the founder of the Manchu" makes no sense, but it's easy to get confused in a foreign history.) Huang's book does use Wade-Giles, so the reviewer's right in general. But because major place names were often an exception in texts discussing China (English scholarship used "postal spellings"), he chose a poor example in Peking. No way for the reviewer to know.
I don't have Huang's book so I can't figure out how the reviewer came to make his statement about the Wanli Emperor's personal name. Huang was a good scholar, so if he made that statement there must be a basis for it. The way that the reviewer's sentence is constructed, the implied name would presumably be 瓅 (li), combining "king" 王 (loosely understood, in this case, since the form actually stands for a different character) and 樂 (joy), in a single character. However, no online or print source records a personal name with that character, and my guess is that this is just a misunderstanding of something Huang wrote.
Placed alongside Scott's comment and Jack's response, I think this post is going to look like satire, but I really am this dull.
'Nurhaci is the founder of the Manchu' makes complete sense to me. He created the confederation of Jurchen tribes which then adopted the Manchu national identity. This process involved classifying some incorporated groups together as 'official' clans when they did not in fact have a prior genealogical relationship, so it makes sense to consider him the 'founder' of the people.
Well, "Manchu" is an ethnonym. As you say, Nurhaci brought Jurchen tribes into a confederation, so "Nurchaci was the founder of the Manchu confederacy" would make sense. And the elaboration of common genealogical narratives might translate to, "Nurhaci was the founder of the Manchu national identity" (although it's an odd use of "founder" and the word "Manchu" was not adopted as an ethnonym till after Nurhaci's death). I guessed the reviewer's meaning was intended to be, "Nurhaci was the founder of the Manchu Dynasty," which he retrospectively was regarded to have been by the dynastic cult itself, which referred to him by a Chinese imperial title. But "Nurhaci was the founder of the Manchu" is like "Bismarck was the founder of the German." I don't think the sentence makes sense, and there are various ways to construe what idea the author might have intended. Among the possible ones, the notion you're proposing, "Nurhaci was the founder of the Manchu people" seems simply wrong, although I did suspect this might be what the reviewer meant. The Jurchens were a self-conscious ethnic group, sharing a common language, territory, religion, and tradition long before Nurhaci.
hmm the original sentence was perfectly intelligible to me even if technically a word may have been missing. Doesn't seem sufficient to support your claim that reviewer has shallow knowledge of China matters. You mentioned there are a lot of similar mistakes maybe offer a couple different examples?
Well, it's unkind to pile on. The reviewer acknowledges he's not knowledgeable about China, so it's not a criticism to say he makes some mistakes as a result. At one point in discussing the continuity of Chinese history he comments that the "last century or two" appear different, but actually carry on the continuity. There's not much you can lump together between the last two centuries in China. The first is solidly an extension of the Imperial order--no visitor to 19th century China would have said, "You know, I see continuities with the distant past," because the proper response would have been, "Well, duh!" The last century has been an abrupt break, no matter how much cultural influence the past seems to hold, and discerning continuities is an interesting analytic task. The extinction of the Imperial state in 1911 is a paradigm shift unlike any in China since the third century BCE.
At another point, the reviewer refers to the core curriculum of the exam system as "The Four Classics of Taoism and Confucianism." There is no such corpus. The "Four Books and Five Classics" is the standard term for the Confucian classical canon; Taoism had little role to play in the exam curriculum, but its two earliest texts (contemporary with the Four Books) were universally known and admired (and still are). This sort of muddle is like the error of taking "Peking" to be Wade-Giles transcription, and my point was that missteps like these don't really matter here. They don't affect the reviewer's goals or the perspective he's trying to convey--he's representing himself honestly as a newcomer to Chinese history, and it's unfair to ask that he show command of the details to convey an outsider perspective.
By the way, what did you take his sentence about Nurhaci to mean? I actually thought he'd simply left off an -s ("founder of the Manchus"), and that it was 50/50 whether he meant the ethnic group or the Dynastic line, with a little overage odds on something else, like TheBard's "national identity" or military system, etc.
Hi - anonymous reviewer here - for some reason I thought "Manchu" was both plural and singular, like "moose." Good to know it should be either "Manchus" or "Manchu confederacy" (in my mind, those are approximately the same thing). And yeah, I assumed anything with "old-school spelling" was Wade-Giles, hence "Peking." Thanks for the info!
Wikipedia presents Wanli, the regnal name that he took on receiving the mandate of heaven, in traditional characters as: 萬曆帝
I get:
萬 = great number (usually translated as 10,000)
曆 = calendar
帝 = heaven's son (which we usually translate as Emperor)
I suspect that 萬曆 would translate roughly as "Great Age Son of Heaven" as in Emperor of an Age of Greatness (as in an age that will live for 10,000 years).
HIs given name was 朱翊鈞.
朱 = Vermillion, which is an imperial color as well as being a surname
翊 = the most likely meaning of this character is respect (IMO)
鈞 = and jūn is an honorific, isn't it? Noble, honorable.
So, Vermillion, Worthy of Respect, or Vermillion Noble Respect, is my take on his given name. I don't know where the author got Joy from.
Reign titles are an unusual Chinese institution. Emperors were responsible for setting the annual calendar (advised by specialists in the bureaucracy), because the solunar calendar used in traditional China required constant adjustment to track the solar (agricultural) year, using leap months (5 every 17 years, if I recall--think of how "Chinese New Year" jumps around). There was no tradition of consecutive year dating: years were designated by a 60-item (sexagenary) cycle that kept recurring, so, for example, 2022 is designated identically with 1962. Reign-period dating was a device to give each year an individual designation.
Starting in 163 BCE, the Chinese emperors would declare reign period designations with elegant, two-character titles, and years were designated on the formula XX #, as in Wan-li 15 (roughly, 1587). Emperors could replace reign titles with new ones as they wished--Empress Wu of the Tang period, China's only fully acknowledged female emperor, used 16 different reign titles over a period of 21 years, changing in mid-year several times. None of these reign titles had anything to do with the emperor's name. Emperors had a personal name (e.g., 朱翊鈞 --朱,by the way, has nothing to do with being an imperial color; it's a common surname, and the Ming founder bore it as a child, when he was a poor farmer's orphan, a monk in a failing monastery, and a beggar . . . his fortunes changed), and they also had an imperial name, unique to them within a dynasty (although often repeated among dynasties). Zhu Yijun's 朱翊鈞 imperial name was Shenzong 神宗. He is "Emperor Shenzong." He is also "*The* Wanli Emperor," but only because the Ming ditched the custom of changing reign titles at will, and set a precedent of one per emperor, so emperors for the first time could be referred to by their reign names, which held through 1911.
Wanli 萬曆 is a pretty orthodox reign title. It means 10,000 (innumerable) calendar[-years]. In Chinese, "10,000 years" (wansui 萬歲) is a traditional wish for an emperor ("May the king live forever!"). It's more recognizable to Americans in its Japanese form: "banzai!"--written identically-- which many of us Boomers learned as the enthusiastic cry of kamikaze pilots in World War II as they tried to immolate themselves by crashing into and sinking US warships. (In fact, that emperor did live a very long time indeed.) Wanli's choice is a prediction that his reign would be long, and it turned out to be a prescient selection.
So the Wanli Emperor had two names (actually, he had more, but I want to avoid any hint of detail here): his personal name, Zhu Yijun, and his imperial name, Shenzong. The "zong 宗" in Shenzong means "ancestor," and was used as an honorific in the imperial names of all but the last Ming emperor. The word "shen 神" means "spirit," "sentient," "amazing," and other senses associated with the idea of a life-force in people that also lives on after death in some ghostly sense. It's conceivable that Ray Huang knew of some usage of "shen" that could be construed as joyful, in which case, he might have said that "Shenzong" meant joyful king. "Joyful" is not one of the sixteen definitions I find for 神 in encyclopedic dictionaries, but who could deny that it is joyful to be sentient? However, there's a certain irony in this, because imperial names such as Shenzong were bestowed only at the point of post-sentience, the dynastic successor bestowing the name upon his recently deceased predecessor (usually, Dad). That's why the last Ming emperor does not have such a name. Of course, the Wanli emperor's son might have been joyful to finally have the opportunity to name his father while he himself was still sentient. Sadly, he was dead within less than a month, having, according to the histories, overindulged in the joy of his new harem. (Take warning, Prince Charles!)
Thanks for the detailed comment! Fascinating! But for which names did the Imperial naming taboo apply? For their reign period names? Or their other names?
I believe the naming taboo applies to the name the Emperor used before becoming Emperor. The other names were ways to avoid using the taboo name.
I figure the naming taboo didn't apply to the family name; if it did the whole imperial family would have to change their name whenever there was a new Emperor.
That's pretty much the role of queens in most human societies as well. Europe is highly unusual in having regent queens.
Fascinating.
A subject of which I knew so little that I didn't even know I knew so little.
This review makes me want to buy the book
Anyone else discovered the trick that when their are alternate spelling methods of foreign words, if you split the difference between the two spellings you often get closer to the correct sound than either of them.
I have been doing this for years (where possible) and feel it is often pretty successful with Asian/indigenous words.
I have noticed that in particular for the sound represented by "q" in hanyu pinyin. Wade-Giles represents it as ch', but in older representations it is commonly spelled ts (tsingtao (qingdao) beer, tsinghua (qinghua) university).
It is quite true that, to the English ear, the Mandarin sound is ambiguous between those two representations. But I'm curious how you would go about attempting to split the difference.
Another example that appears in the post is that Wade-Giles represented pinyin "r" as "j". This is easy to explain - the sound can be anywhere along the continuum between the sound of the R in "row" and the sound of the SI in "vision", and I assume J was picked to represent that second sound, possibly with an eye toward French.
But while pinyin "q" is a case of an intermediate sound, pinyin "r" isn't really. Every point on the continuum is a legitimate pronunciation of the Mandarin sound; what you get will differ from speaker to speaker and even from utterance to utterance holding the speaker constant.
I much prefer the Wade-Giles rendering. The familiarity makes the words more memorable, and it isn't any less accurate overall than Pinyin.
Except that Pinyin is now the official rendering of Putonghua in Latin script. All translations going forward will be in Pinyin. All serious Western scholarship is being rendered in Pinyin.
An unfortunate choice, in my opinion.
I never understood what I was supposed to do with those apostrophes ('). Supposedly they are aspirations, but once I started learning Putonghua, I could not see any correlation between the WG spellings and the Beijing way of pronunciation. At least with Pinyin and its tonal notations, one can figure out how the word should be pronounced (once you've got 4 tones for each vowel sound down, and all those subtle frictives in Beijing-style Putonghua mastered).
Why should we care? “Rome” is Roma. “Cologne” is Köln. Beijing can be called whatever the Chinese want in China. Here in the US, we should use a romanization designed for Americans, not whatever happens to be official over there.
But “Beijing” is what the Chinese want it called in China, being the pinyin romanization of 北京! “Peking” is the older English name, borrowed from a Portuguese transliteration, and that sees relatively little use now except when in relation to things still associated with the older name like Peking Duck.
Come to think of it, I‘m not sure why I wrote this comment…
My opinion is that there was no reason to move away from "Peking", which was fine.
What's unforgivable is that we moved away from "Canton" to the unreadable "Guangzhou"—which is not the name of the place in Cantonese!
Americans should just use the Yale romanization system, which was actually designed so that Americans can pronounce something reasonable close to correct by just reading it. Under no circumstances should pinyin be used with a generalist American reading audience. It’s a great romanization system—for people who speak Mandarin. Everyone who speaks English but not Mandarin should use Yale.
"Maybe in some alternate universe a Ming-era person discovers that lightning can be tamed like fire - would that have helped? I’m not aware of any experiments with electricity, though they did have gunpowder and printing presses. "
They were not ready for a scientific revolution. At this point the Chinese believed the earth was flat and they didn't even have Euclidean geometry. Not that they weren't smart! They were highly intelligent, it's just they didn't have the cultural apparatus for scientific investigation. A good example is Chinese astronomy. Right around this time period Chinenese astronomy was a state monopoly conducted by the Bureau of Mathematics and Astronomy, under the Ministry of Rites. It was part of the Ministry of Rites because the sole purpose of Astronomy was to prepare an annual calendar that identified lucky and unlucky days. The calendar's primary purpose is to establish the days certain rites will occur on. Astronomer's studied the stars so they could predict the equinoxes and eclipses so that rites would happen at the right time.
In 1603 the Chinese scholar Xu Guanqi converts to Christianity under the influence of his friend Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit priest who came to China as a missionary. Ricci has been sharing western knowledge with Xu, and together they decide to translate all of western science into Chinese. By 1610 they've published translations explaining geometry, Ptolemaic astronomy (not the best science, but at least the Earth is a sphere and the math works), and other odds and ends. Note that this is still 1610 and the scientific revolution is just kicking off in Europe: all Xu is doing is trying to get China caught up with Europe's mathematical and astronomical knowledge circa 500 AD or so.
Xu challenges the Chinese astronomers to a face off to prove which system is better, with the Jesuits making their own calendar to compare to the Chinese calendar. The Jesuit calendar is so much more accurate than the Bureau's that the Emperor grants Xu permission to translate and publish the remainder of Western science into Chinese. A Jesuit priest returns to Europe to recruit more astronomer-missionaries and collect books of science.
So what happens from there? What happens is the eunuchs and other bureaucrats get pissed off at some rando showing up and rocking the boat (and tradition! The Earth is a sphere? How radical!). The Minister of Rites manages to put the Jesuit missionaries on trial for disparaging Chinese rites. Though none are executed, many are banished and the rest stop publicly spreading scientific knowledge and try to keep their nose clean. In 1619 the priest they sent to get more books arrives with 7,000 of them, plus something special: a brand new telescope! While all this was happening in China the telescope was invented, spread across Europe, and was being used to make amazing new astronomical discoveries. The moons of Jupiter! The transit of Venus! Craters on the moon! It's a big moment, and China has just received this state of the art invention from across the world.
Of course, the Chinese won't let him in because the Jesuits are persona-non-grata with the bureaucracy right now. He sneaks in anyway, and by 1622 court politics have shifted enough that the Jesuits are back in business. They set up shop and by 1626 have published a Chinese treatise on the telescope and all the cool discoveries that have already been made with it. Wang Cheng publishes "Diagrams and Explanation of the Marvelous Devices of the Far West" where he expounds on the telescope and its value for navigation, warfare, astronomy, etc. One difficulty is that the Chinese do not have the technical skill to grind glass lenses, and have no science of optics. Still, the knowledge is here and there are people excited to spread it.
In 1629 another showdown is held, this time with the task of predicting when the next day's solar eclipse will occur. The Jesuit astronomers predict the start time and duration down to the minute, while the Bureau of Calendar's is off on the start by an hour and the duration by almost two hours. The Emperor is impressed enough to put Xu in charge of a Calendar Reform Project. The Jesuits translate more works on state-of-the art astronomy from letters they receive from Europe: they publish books on Tycho's model of the solar system, and in 1632 they use Tycho's system to predict the conjunction of Mars and Venus. The old Chinese system is off by eight days. The current leader of the Jesuit astronomer-priests, Schall, is appointed the head of the Bureau of Calendars.
So at this point China has all the knowledge it needs to kick off a scientific revolution, the kind that is happening simultaneously in Europe. The trouble is that they don't have the cultural institutions for it. They have the fuel, they have the spark, but there's no oxygen in the room.
The Imperial Bureaucracy is against this whole project from the get go, and the only thing that holds them back is the Emperor's support. When the Emperor dies in 1664 the new Emperor is told by his officials that the Calendar Reform project is just an excuse to propagate Christianity, upset tradition, and destabilize China. Schall is accused of creating calendars that cause state rites to occur at inauspicious times, leading to the death of the previous Emperor. The project heads are imprisoned. Schall is sentenced to death by dismemberment and the rest of his group are sentenced to exile after flogging. The sentence is commuted to house arrest after the princess dowager intervenes on their behalf, but the project is dead. The Jesuits are thrown out and the Chinese officials who worked for them are beheaded for treason. An anti-western official who has no knowledge of mathematics or astronomy is chosen as the new head of the Bureau of Calendars. They return to the old methods for the most part, choosing tradition over accuracy.
This isn't the last battle: in 1669 the Jesuits hold a new series of face offs against the Bureau, winning each one. The new Emperor becomes interested in western science, but doesn't do much about it and his successor has no interest whatsoever.
Meanwhile in Europe the scientific revolution is a wildfire that can't be stopped.
I know this is an overlong comment, but I find it very interesting. As far as I can tell it is the institutions and cultural ideas that made the difference. In China astronomy was only done by the Imperial Bureaucracy, and was subject to bureaucratic politics. Tradition and stability was valued much higher than the pursuit of knowledge or competence: I mean, look what happened to that General in the book review, he was highly competent but died penniless because he might have caused instability. In Europe knowledge wasn't controlled by the state but by the universities. Decentralized and independent they were able to pass on knew knowledge rapidly and weren't beholden to concerns about stability. People were sharing discoveries left and right, building their own telescopes, publishing papers about what they found, having debates about the implications. The telescope was invented in 1608, and by 1610 Galileo has already published "The Starry Messenger", by 1611 Kepler has invented an improved telescope, and soon every astronomer in Europe has one. At the same time that China is throwing the Jesuits out of the Bureau and going back a flat earth model, Isaac Newton is crafting the first reflecting telescope.
All that to say, China was well suited to thousands of years of stability and completely unsuited for a scientific revolution.
Interestingly, I believe that Chinese astronomers had noted that the angle to the sun is different at different points on earth. But since they believed the earth was flat, rather than a sphere, they didn’t do the calculation Eratosthenes did to find the circumference of the earth, but instead used the base of a triangle and its two angles to calculate what they thought was the distance to the sun.
See some discussion here: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/46534/before-european-influence-circa-1600-did-any-chinese-believe-the-earth-was-sphe
Thanks for the link. Reading it also drove something else home for me: the Jesuits in 1600 couldn't have been the first time the Chinese were exposed to the idea that the world is a sphere. They directly traded with plenty of Arab, Persian, and Indian cultures that knew the world was round. It reminds me of the Macartney Embassy to China in 1793: they tried to impress the Chinese with Western inventions and trade goods, but they were viewed as barbarians (like every other nation outside the Empire) and were snubbed. The Emperor sent a letter to King George III stating "Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce." That same attitude must have prevented outside scientific ideas from catching on in China from trade.
The letter is definitely worth a read, by the way. It's dripping with condescension.
https://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/classes/2c/texts/1792QianlongLetterGeorgeIII.htm
About a year ago Greg Cochran was arguing with someone about whether the Mayans knew the Earth to be a sphere.
https://twitter.com/gcochran99/status/1447407768244084738
His interlocutor refused to believe a civilization could know astronomy but not that.
That’s not how I read that thread. I read it as Cochran insisting that Mayans didn’t know astronomy, because he claimed they didn’t know the earth was a sphere, but not providing any reason to think the Mayans didn’t know the earth was a sphere.
I don’t know who that guy (Cochran) is, but to be fair to him, the consensus view is that the Mayans thought our world was a plane—maybe an infinite plane.
They had really comprehensive astronomical records as everyone knows, but even though that can give you a strong predictive power and sophisticated calendar, it doesn’t mean you have a strong underlying grasp of what’s happening mechanically in the heavens: just like the Chinese, in this instance.
Cochran was responding to a claim that some Amerindians (later to be specified as Mayans) not merely knew astronomy but were "hundreds of years ahead of “western civilization”" in both that & mathematics.
Yeah, that strikes me as a claim that is unverifiable and unfalsifiable, rather than false. There's surely many individual bits of understanding that each culture had that the others wouldn't have for centuries.
I would guess that in the specific field of mathematics, western Europeans really were far ahead of anyone outside of the Old World. There was no mathematics the Amerindians knew about that Europeans didn't.
I appreciate the effort you put into writing this comment.
> In Europe knowledge wasn't controlled by the state but by the universities.
Another oft-repeated explanation of the same phenomenon is to give credit to Europe having several states, all competing with each other. The state with a navy that didn't adopt a useful thing like telescope would be seriously disadvantaged. To take an example related to calendars and the 1580s, there was a period when the Gregorian calendar was adopted non-uniformly: pious non-Catholic monarchs made a great show of not adopting the Popist invention ... except until the discrepancy with the calendar months and the reality became increasingly embarrassing. The Russian empire most famously was a hold-out, which is why the October Revolution happened in November ...
True! When the telescope was first invented the Dutch state tried to keep it a secret for military purposes. That didn't work at all, and within the year you have Galileo making his own.
Interesting, a longer comment might have included the effect of the protestant rebellion on the flourishing (in some cases) and suppression (in others) of knowledge in post-medieval Europe.
This is an excellent comment, and I think your conclusions are more or less correct, only I doubt very much the core issue was cultural ideas, tradition or stability. Rather, the problem was, as usual, greedy shitheads. The literal dickless wonders running the show didn't really take exception to some calendrical quibble which, as you note yourself, they couldn't be bothered to even learn about; they took exception to a decrease in their own power. They hated being shown up by upstarts, and worse, by some foreign barbarian ones! If these new guys gain power in the machine, then someone else must lose it, and there's nobody else around but the null brigade; they might not be destabilizing China, but they're sure as fuck destabilizing the eunuchs' cushy setup. They couldn't care less about China if they tried anyway, as evidenced by their conduct.
The only problem here that can be imputed to tradition is the specific tradition of keeping all these career academics around in positions of power, which is something that ought to alarm the conscientious observer of modern America.
I think this is basically right, but overestimates the eunuch problem and underestimates the bureaucrat problem.
All the bureaucrats are chosen based on a system that boils down to competitive essay-writing, with all the essays on a handful of classics and written in a specific format. One result is that your whole elite, while theoretically drawn from the whole country, is selected to be a very specific type of person. A worse result is that all the excess capacity of elites is sunk into a zero-sum essay-writing game. There's no slack in the system - anyone who takes time to learn about the universe will get outcompeted by someone who used that time to read more Confucius. The result is the same thing we're starting to have - a 2-dimensional elite who are very good at the test we use to select them, but totally devoid of all other merits.
In Europe, by contrast, most of society was still largely hereditary, and the lack of competition resulted in a large number of people with mounds of resources who can do whatever they liked. Most of them just ate and hunted, but some of them advanced civilisation. What competition there was boiled down to getting the monarch to like you (for which novelty, and patronising arts and culture, was a decent strat), or getting other aristocrats to think you're cool (ditto). This then creates a market for secondary industries like lens grinders.
The Eunuchs should be a countervailing force, and possibly sometimes were (Zheng He) but the Chinese opinion generally was that they were too venial. They were also basically servants, so didn't have their own independent wealth/power base to start doing cool experiments.
Interestingly, this isn't something where we've coincidentally fallen for the same trap as the Chinese. The British East India Company saw the Chinese system, loved it, and copied it. Then the British copied it from the EIC as Travelyanism. Then the old American Progressives (Teddy Roosevelt and co) copied the British and introduced it to America (the Pendleton Act). That then metastasised into the idea of meritocracy, soaked into the fabric of American thought, and was shipped back to Europe with the GIs. Which I guess gives the Chinese a fitting revenge for the Opium wars or something.
the last para is interesting never heard of this before. do you have some sources / references i can look into?
Available on google books, albeit from a liberal pro-professional civil service angle:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6zR7Nsts5zcC&pg=PA5&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false
I think there are also parliamentary debates on the Northcote-Travelyan reforms where some of the Tories predict what will happen with reference to China stagnating, but Hansard's search function isn't working for me today
Interesting how people often warn about the dangers of too much STEM education and not enough humanities, and yet we have a historical example of an opposite extreme.
I'm not sure how you equate the limited curriculum of the Chinese exam system with the modern study of the humanities, unless your categorisation is that all non-STEM subjects are by definition humanities. Done properly, humanities is a thinking education, encouraging challenging orthodoxies (it isn't always done well). I don't see a system based around what was in effect a system of showing adherence to a prescribed set of texts as humanities so much as a form of demonstrating adherence to a belief system, so I don't think we can define the Chinese competitive exams as humanities, and we might be better defining it as a way of recruiting a priesthood.
It's really similar to the old literae humaniores courses you still get at a few places (possibly just Oxford), but with Confucius instead of Virgil. Modern humanities courses are derived from it, but in dumbed down and in English.
Showing adherence to a prescribed set of texts is also the entirety of a humanities course - you're given a set of books to read then you write essays about them.
Possibly for literary studies, but that clearly doesn't apply to history or philosophy where texts are starting points for investigation. And you won't get a top grade in a humanities programme by simply demonstrating knowledge of the texts and their accepted interpretation; it's about displaying thought and research skills as well. At base, a good university education in any subject is to prepare students to ask the question 'what happens if I do this?'.
I'm not saying there are not badly-taught courses where faithfullness to the text and the prescribed ideology for interpreting it is required. But that is not modern humanities any more than the Ming-period competitive examination.
I once knew a fellow of Chinese extraction who liked to theorize that so many generations of putting priority on writing essays might not have been effective governance but may have resulted in the higher average Chinese IQ. (He drew a parallel to the Jewish IQ and the history of prioritizing study of the Torah.) I did not quibble with him then, and I present this defense of this type of education without comment.
It's potentially viable, but the killer stat is whether mandarin fertility/child mortality was higher or lower than the rest of the population. Although (taking this and running speculatively with it), didn't China used to have a lot of famines? That could presumably increase Mandarin fitness if they and their children were more likely to survive them than peasants were.
Also, are the Chinese smarter than the Japanese? Otherwise that's a hint that it's something else, as the Japanese were feudal (albeit stereotypically with a lot more strategy and scheming than their Teutonic counterparts).
Yet another example in the endless struggle between Wordcels and Shape-Rotators.
The SAT is pretty much an IQ test, so has pretty much the opposite result - it selects for smart people.
The idea that the meritocracy is bad is one of those provocative ideas that is quite wrong on examining it for about five minutes. It yields much better results.
There's a reason why meritocratic countries advance so much faster than more primitive, backwards ones.
The key is actually operating mostly on merit and not other things that people try to substitute for merit.
China was a meritocracy, and Europe wasn’t, at the time Europe overtook China. Realistically, the Imperial examination boils down to the effort you put in plus how smart you are. The current education system in the West is the same, plus varying degrees of corruption.
If you chose the leadership of a country purely by IQ, then up to any point well into the 60s you’d end up with a Communist country. The same would apply to more conventional meritocracy, but that at least has the advantage of filtering out the weird ones, which would be the real danger of the IQ-only system; you’d end up with half the budget going towards anime.
Empirically, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that meritocracy produces better results than either democracy of the hereditary principle.
First off, smart people mostly aren't communists.
Secondly, China wasn't a meritocracy. It didn't select for people who were best at leading. That is what meritocracy IS - it is about having merit at the thing you do, not in some ethereal sense. This is precisely why capitalism works so well - you are rewarded by generating value for other people.
People who think "merit" is just about raw IQ aren't living in reality. IQ makes you more able to posses actually useful forms of merit, but IQ itself doesn't actually mean anything - it doesn't matter how smart you are if you spend all your time navel gazing or engaging in other useless or frivolous activity.
The reason why IQ tests can be useful is because they let you find the people who have the highest ability cap. But simply giving people IQ tests is not sufficient to determine merit at a particular job or occupation, because lots of other things are involved in merit as well. In the end, the person with the highest IQ is not necessarily the person with the most merit, and indeed, it is not uncommon for the person with the most merit not to be the highest IQ person but the person with fairly high IQ but very high diligence and thus willingness to hone skills beyond the point of diminishing returns.
I agree with the capitalism point, but do western bureaucracies select for people who are best at leading? Despite the popular Rotschild-related conspiracy theories, the most successful capitalists don't in fact wield most of the power.
1) They were until Communism actually started to fail, even though most other people weren't convinced.
2) This version of meritocracy (the best person to do the job should do the job) is too vague to be meaningful as it can't be operationalised. The person who thinks the best leaders will be produced by taking children of current leaders and raising them from birth to be confident and decisive enough to rule and the person who thinks the best leaders will be produced by sending the people with the best SATs to Harvard, then having them work at McKinsey for a bit before becoming congressional staffers are both "meritocrats."
"Meritocracy" meaning "the people who should lead us are the people who are best at leading" is question-begging bordering on tautology. Actual meritocracy, both in the view of the man who coined it and every time it's now used, means selecting leaders/functionaries/bureaucrats through competitive examination, which is the Imperial Chinese system. There's an element of motte-and-bailey between the two definitions now that it's not just a term of abuse, but most people understand it to mean the current Western system but shorn of it's plutocratic skew.
The European "scientific revolution" of the 16th and 17th Centuries that you're talking about was largely a revolution in entrepreneurial alchemy. The flood of silver from the Spanish conquest was upsetting economies all over Europe, causing extreme inflation—and especially in Central Europe, where the older metal economies of Central European kingdoms were being disrupted—rulers started hiring alchemists to produce gold. It turned out that silver thalers had enough gold in them that could be extracted to make the first wave of entrepreneurial alchemists seem rather successful! Of course, a lot of the alchemists were total failures (and many of them were executed as charlatans). But that led to more explicit contracts (which led to the development of contract law across Europe—without which a modern economy can't run). And rulers also invested in mining technology to more efficiently extract metals (and the alchemists were there helping out with the process of metal refining).
With tight finances in an inflationary economy, rulers would sometimes sell stock in these mining and metallurgical enterprises to fund them. Thus the modern corporation as owned by stockholders evolved alongside the boom in entrepreneurial alchemy (again spurring along the European economy). There are pictures from that period depicting large factories with hundreds of workers toiling over refining equipment. Many of these became something like research labs, where once they gave up on the pipe dreams of transmutation, they started exploiting secondary technologies that had practical uses—such as the reliable production of potassium nitrate (which was used in older alchemical experiments, but which found a new use in the burgeoning firearms industry of the time). And lest you think I'm exaggerating the importance of the early alchemical entrepreneurs on the development of a modern European economy and sciences, remember that during this period the people we now consider to be scientific luminaries—such as Newton and Boyle—regarded themselves as alchemists. Most of Newton's notebooks are alchemical in nature. Calculus and the law of gravity were just some ideas that he tossed off along the way in his search for Van Helmont's alchahest (sort of a universal alchemical solvent). As a reference, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire by Pamela H. Smith, is well worth reading.
Anyway, China didn't have the destabilizing influx of New World silver, and its rulers didn't have to adapt to a vast inflationary cycle disrupting their ordered economies. Likewise, as far I as I can tell Chinese alchemists were only interested in creating life-extending elixirs, and the only gold they were obsessed with was the false gold that was the basis of their elixir theory. (Whatever false gold was, I don't know.)
Alchemy was certainly relevant for some of the things that came later (notably Boyle and Lavoisier and Dalton’s work that turned the earth and fire elemental system upside down) but I would have thought that Galileo and Kepler and Copernicus, not to mention Vesalius and other claimed starting points of the Scientific Revolution, were somewhat independent of alchemy.
Lee Smolin in his book, Time Reborn, regards Leibnitz as being the first philosopher/scientist to start thinking about the cosmos in a new theoretical way—one that was unconnected to the mechanistic clockwork universe that was inherited from Aristotelian predecessors. Smolin argues that Leibnitz saw time to be a function of the nature of the universe, rather than something that was outside and separate from Newton's clockwork universe. Einstein may have been influenced by Leibnitz when he formulated General Relativity (speculation).
But if we were to look for the origin of the experimental method, I think that would be with the 11th Century's Ibn al-Haytham who was the first to connect the Greek idea of a hypothesis with the process of reproducible experimentation to confirm the hypothesis. So I would qualify Ibn al-Haytham as the world's first scientist—in the modern definition of science. I think there was some argument a while back about whether Newton read an early translation of al Haytham's treatise on optics, but I'm kind of vague about the details.
Not that Kepler and Galileo didn't provide significant stepping stones in the understanding of our cosmos, but even though today we consider them to be early astronomers, they would have seen themselves working in the traditions of astrology and a calendrical knowledge. After all, why did kings and potentates fund the work of our early "astronomers"? They wanted a better way of predicting future events (i.e. astrology).
I don’t find that story even a little convincing. You could make a similar story for 50 other things.
Lol! I knew I'd provoke a strong response from some of ACX folks!
The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire by Pamela H. Smith, is well worth reading. Next year I'll do a book report on it.
More soon, while I address Kenny's comment.
I would also direct you to Newton's notebooks. Just looking over the first 50 entries in the catalog of his notes and notebooks, 47 are about subjects related to alchemy and hermetic knowledge. Newton's primary intellectual occupation was alchemy. The stuff we remember him for was but a small part of what he was about.
https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/texts/newtons-works/alchemical
Here are some links to pics of some 16th and 17th Century alchemical enterprises. As you can see, alchemical labs were common enough for contemporary artists to depict them, and they display all the signs of a top-down organizational structure, as well as evidence of extensive logistical organization — after all a significant number of craft workers were involved in the creation of the devices that they were using (a holdover of these craft guilds would be the glassblowers who staffed 20th Century chemistry labs). Also, it would take a significant input of capital to fund these projects. So what we're seeing in these pictures are the first organized experimental enterprises whose ultimate goal was to create value from experimental knowledge.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alchemical_Laboratory_-_Project_Gutenberg_eText_14218.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Alchemist.JPG
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Early_Italian_Pharmacy_17th_century_fa_2000.001.263.tif
https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/1004507/view/distillation-16th-century
I am not saying the connections made are wrong. It’s that the connections aren’t “the difference”, and that there are 50 other series of connections you could make.
But China has suffered from inflation far before anyone else, with their invention of Fiat currency hundreds of years before it happened in the West. I think this is too narrow of a view of Science (to bring it down only to Alchemy) and while this is an interesting perspective, I do not think it explains the full, or even the majority of the differences.
I don't know about the fiat currencies of China. Do you have some links?
However, Europe did have a lot of competing states—which China did not—except in interregnums between dynasties. The competitive political pressures during an inflationary era and the threat of the Ottomans Empire on Central European states may have made spurred new economic models as well as research into things that states would find of practical use. Bacon opined that "science" was about the creation of useful things, and he disparaged wasting time on theory if it wasn't towards of goal of utility.
A quick google search should send you in the right direction, the big one was the twelfth century one.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26314818
This is a gold selling website - but who would be more credible in talking about ancient inflation:
https://www.bullionvault.com/gold-news/china_paper_money_chinese_printing_ming_marco_polo_072120083
Bacon did do that for sure, but can we hold it against him that way back then he did not know that almost all theoretical research will turn out to be practical too - something people today do not know.
> Anyway, China didn't have the destabilizing influx of New World silver, and its rulers didn't have to adapt to a vast inflationary cycle disrupting their ordered economies
I thought the opposite. The Ming had a massive inflationary problem with their paper money, and the Philippines was basically jointly colonized by Chinese merchants and the Spanish to exchange Mexican silver (high demand in China) for goods like like silk and porcelain.
Yea the Chinese market was particularly damaged by Spanish silver.
Amazing comment - I lived across from Xu Guanqi's park, house and museum, and I loved to spend time there. He was, in his acceptance but also cleverness, ahead of his time, and it is a shame that the system around him was not made to accept his ideas. In his area of town, Xujiahui, still a Catholic church stands, a remnant of those times, and quite beautiful even to my atheist eyes. Still, history is repeating itself and the church is often closed and its existence is uncertain in the future due to the prime location it takes up.
Anyhow, thank you for the tale, more detailed than the one I knew, about Xu.
It's a great story, but I don't think it supports your conclusion.
The fact that X didn't happen in China doesn't mean it *couldn't* happen in China; the fact that X did happen in Europe doesn't mean that it was particularly or more likely to happen in Europe.
Consider this possibility: that in fact there was approximately a 50:50 chance that a scientific revolution would happen in China in the 1600s; and the same chance that one would happen in Europe. The coins were tossed, and as luck has it, Europe came up heads, China tails. If this is true, then looking in the tea leaves of Chinese history for why it came up tails is useless. It was just a historical happenstance.
Now I haven't given any evidence for this, only a just-so story. But I think accepting that some things are down to chance is a much better starting point than going into the study of history determined to find the reasons why X.
中国人把天空分成四宫，象我们将一个苹果切成四大块那样，每一部分有一古代象征性的动物：苍龙为东方和春，朱雀为南方和夏，白虎为西方和秋，玄武（或“阴沉的武士”）为北方和冬。而紧围着天帝极星的北拱极区按类似于五行的象征性关系又认为是独立的中央黄宫。这种五行观贯穿在整个中国的自然哲学中。此外，还有一个比这更重要的天区分划。
The Chinese divide the sky into four houses, as we would cut an apple into four pieces, each with an ancient symbolic animal: the Canglong for the East and Spring, the Vermilion Bird for the South and Summer, the White Tiger for the West and Autumn, and the Xuanwu (or "gloomy warrior") for the North and Winter. The northern arch of the polar region, which immediately surrounds the Emperor's pole star, is considered to be a separate central yellow palace in a similar symbolic relationship to the five elements. This view of the five elements permeates the entire Chinese philosophy of nature. In addition, there is a more important division of the heavens than this.
从远古以来，中国的赤道（与黄道相对）被分成28份，称作28宿（月站），每宫七宿，每宿由一特殊的星座标定，从其中某一特定的定标星（距星）起算，因而每一宿所占的赤道范围有很大差别。将各宿隔开的时圈从天极辐射出来，象被天空网成许多桔子瓣，某些宿位于赤道之上，另一些分布于赤道南北。
Since ancient times, the Chinese equator (as opposed to the ecliptic) has been divided into 28 parts, called the 28 constellations (lunar stations), with seven constellations in each house, each of which is marked by a special constellation, counting from a particular fixed star (distance star), so that each constellation occupies a very different equatorial area. The circles of time separating the constellations radiate out from the celestial pole, like a network of orange petals in the sky, with some constellations located above the equator and others distributed north and south of it.
中国天文学发展的历史是悠久的。到汉代已有盖天、宣夜和浑天等学派。盖天说认为，天如盖，盖心是北极，天盖左旋，日月星辰右转。宣夜说认为天无定形，日月星辰“自然浮生虚空之中”，并不附着于“天体”之上。浑天说认为天如蛋壳，地如蛋黄，天地乘气而立，载水而行。
Chinese astronomy has a long history of development. By the Han Dynasty, there were already schools of thought such as Gai Tian, Xuan Yi and Hun Tian. According to Gai Tian, the sky is like a lid, and the center of the lid is the north pole. XuanYi said that the sky has no fixed shape and the sun, moon and stars "float naturally in the void" and are not attached to the "heavenly body". The Huntian says that the sky is like an egg shell and the earth is like the yolk of an egg, and that the sky and the earth stand on air and carry water.
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%BC%A0%E8%A1%A1
"When the Emperor dies in 1664 the new Emperor is told by his officials that the Calendar Reform project is just an excuse to propagate Christianity, upset tradition, and destabilize China."
I don't know about destabilizing tradition, but the Jesuits were missionaries. No matter their good intentions, they did wish to propagate Christianity, and upset tradition in the meantime.
What I'm getting at here is just that the accusations against them weren't exactly false. I don't know if we can infer anything about the Chinese readiness to accept new technology, because the story seems completely explainable by hostility to foreign religion and culture. Hardly unique to the Chinese.
I agree, that the spread of Christianity in China would upset tradition. But so would the spread of new ideas in general! If the concern was the spread of Christianity alone, then keep the translated books and kick out the missionaries. They had proven multiple times by that point that the Ptolemaic (and by this time Tychonic) system worked better than the Chinese system. Yet when they kicked out the Jesuits they didn't replace them with a traditional Chinese official using the new knowledge, they replaced them with a traditional Chinese official using the traditional Chinese method.
Take in contrast Europe, which was still reeling from it's own religious upsetting of tradition: the Protestant Reformation. That movement certainly brought significant amounts of instability and war: it practically tore Europe apart (the 30 years war kicked of in 1618, remember). Hans Lippershey (the inventor of the telescope) was a Protestant: yet Catholic Galileo still used his invention. Tycho and Kepler were Protestants, yet that didn't stop Catholic astronomers from using Tycho's tables and adopting Kepler's ellipses. The Pope censured Galileo and banned books on heliocentrism, and yet that didn't stop European (even most Catholic) astronomers from using heliocentric systems in their work.
I think the primary difference is that there was no institution in Europe that was capable of stopping the spread of new scientific knowledge, and at least one institution (the university system) that actively encouraged the spread. That second part is important: I'm sure the Emperor didn't care much whether common folk believed the Earth was round or flat, but without independent institutions of education where new ideas were rewarded with prestige, who was going to bother to debate it?
Your comment was more interesting than the book review itself.
If you liked it then I’d suggest checking out this blog post, it’s where I first learned about it and got most of my info.
http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2011/04/far-seeing-looking-glass-goes-to-china.html?m=1
Thanks, I've read it now and liked seeing more of the comparison with Europe's progress.
Tangential, but important. Re. "Probably the biggest thing I learned is that human history is little more than 5000 years of gang war": This is a common complaint about humanity, but unjust. I think we should rephrase it as, "The history we've chosen to write is little more than 5000 years of gang war." Taking that as your baseline for human nature is like basing your expectations about life on Hollywood blockbusters. Only in the past 30 years have historians begun to look at the everyday life of ordinary people, which makes up the vast majority of human history.
True. My grandfather lived for 88 years, but if you asked me about him the first thing that would come to mind was that he fought in WWII. That was just two years of his 88 year life, which was primarily spent in peaceful work and loving parenting. It's just not as interesting to talk about.
It’s not interesting to *him* to talk about. But I really would be much more interested in knowing about what we’re the differences in daily life between someone living in 1500s China and someone living in 1700s Europe and someone living in 1200s Tenochtitlan than knowing who killed whom on which battlefield.
I agree, I wish there were more works about "years of no significance", where you could see what life was like at such-and-such a place and such-and-such a time when there isn't tremendous upheaval.
One potential such book is Jacques Gernet's, Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion.
I didn't know Herodotus wrote in 1990! Thanks for the tip. I'd heard that the Iliad and Odyssey were a concoction of the 1970's. Herodotus being a 90's phenomenon makes sense in that context.
You're right that the OP certainly overstates the murder monkey take on history. But it's a hook, and hooks indicate the type of fish wished for. And we, my friend, are loose fish.
I suppose you're talking about the parts of book 2 about the Egyptians. Fair enough. But it's only about 1/10th of the Histories, which are mostly about wars, the histories of noble families, and legends.
+1
Herodotus includes ethnographic details about virtually all the peoples mentioned in the Histories. I'm not sure what percentage is ethnography vs. wars vs. noble families vs. legends (which, given the Classical Greek mindset, can't be clearly delineated from ethnography anyway), but it's definitely much more than 10% (heck, the Egyptian section alone is more than 10%).
The study of culture is a lot more than 10% of the Egyptian book, but that's the one book of 6 with the most of it. Hence my guesstimate of 1/10.
Writing of wars, nobility, and legends can be ethnography, but it can't be "the everyday life of ordinary people".
+2
Thanks for bringing up Herodotus - I love that guy! Now I want to go re-read him again
As a holder of a PhD in history awarded 20 years ago, think this statement about historians only looking at everyday life in the last thirty years is demonstrably wrong. The Annales school of historians have had a consistent focus on everyday life and using this as bottom-up history for almost 80 years, based on earlier research by scholars such as Bloch, and there was a similar strand of Soviet historical research (cynically, because it was the only area where one could ignore Marx but produce acceptable results). Less focusedly, even the great patrician English historians of the early-twentieth century, the A.J.P. Taylor and F.M. Stenton types, were producing work on lived experience alongside other historical narratives. I don't know American historiography well enough to say for certain that social history was a norm in the early-mid-twentieth century, but if be rather surprised if it wasn't. It certainly isn't an innovation of the 1990s anyway.
You may be commenting on popular history here, which might be more true (there were popular books looking at everyday life for the millennium of Domesday Book in 1986 but that's not way off your 30 years), but it seems a bit odd to say historians, whose primary outputs are academic papers and monographs, are not studying something because the companies that produce popular history don't publish books in those areas. Commissioning editors are not historians.
+3
But... what would you estimate is the fraction of peer-reviewed history articles published since 2000 which focused on the lives of ordinary people, divided by the fraction of such articles published before 1960 (not counting studies of societies which left no evidence of a ruling class)? If that ratio is more than 10, then my statement may not be True-with-a-capital-T, but is still basically correct.
I never meant there were literally no such articles earlier, only that there's been a very marked increase in them. And 1990 isn't a hard line, but was my attempt to pick out the inflection point in the sigma curve describing the fraction of attention historians pay to the lower classes. You should read it not as if it were in the context of claiming priority on a new discovery, but in the context of being a qualitative description of what you expect to find in a history journal today versus many years ago. I stated it in simple terms to avoid writing this very paragraph.
I would have said there is an inflection point that begins with the Annales' school. But having read several 19th century books, it's not like social history and individual life were ignored in earlier history research. There is definitely a lot more clout given to social history today, given that the medieval history textbook I teach from has been gutted some of my preferred political and economic material and replaced it with additional social history, which, while extremely valuable does not fit within the goals of my intro course. The correct view is boring: social history has more clout within the academy today than it did in the past, but that doesn't mean social history was ignored and irrelevant among previous generations.
I agree with John here, that social history is not a new field, but it is currently receiving more focus, although I suspect that other than in specific sub-disciplines such as agricultural history this may have peaked.
I'd date this increased focus from the 1970s though, where it seems to the in with the postmodernist turn. So you're not wrong, but perhaps missing the backstory in your original comment.
You may also be correct on the ratio of articles, but as I have a view that modern articles have a lower bar to cross to get published (this doesn't mean they're worse mind you) due to more opportunities to do so, I'm not sure this would be statistically meaningful.
>Only in the past 30 years have historians begun to look at the everyday life of ordinary people, which makes up the vast majority of human history.
I know this to be false, for I've read March Bloch's "The Feodal Society", which was published in 1939 (so not in the last 30, but the last 80+ years), and ot was, except for the first chapter (which relates to the "gang wars" that threatened Europe in the early middle age), entirely dedicated to the organization of society, it's judicial rules, it's way to handle contracts, how social classes gained or lost privileges or burdens, etc etc.
The big problem with history and books regarding history of the World, is that the authors very often don't even know the language/ languages of the era or region.
5 thousands years of gang wars it's a description which ' fit' perfectly within Western culture, especially in those countries where English is the only known language ( plus maybe another one or two, used by minorities).
That's like quoting Dostoevsky without reading his works in Russian language.
You can watch ' Throne in blood ' by Akira Kurosawa and after few minutes you recognise Shakespeare's work but rarely can you translate papers, sources, books, you name it from other languages into English without losing the main 'spirit '.
I wish I could read more books about the history of different countries around the World written by authors who rely on their own researches based on solid knowledge of the original language/ languages.
Your parentheses beside the English being the only known language immediately hilights the problems with that statement, particularly that you previously said 5000 years of gang violence. English isn’t a old language and is relatively new to Britain. Do we really have to read Dostoevsky in Russian? Maybe for the language but not the themes.
'5000 year of gang violence' was a quote from another comment not mine. Regards
<i>English isn’t a old language and is relatively new to Britain.</i>
Huh? English has been spoken in Britain for over 1500 years. Even if you only count modern English as "proper" English, that's still 500 years, which is (as far as I can tell) pretty much normal for European languages.
Old English really isn’t English, it’s German. Anyway I said relatively new to Britain. There are older languages indigenous to Britain.
Old English is clearly not German, as they come from different branches of the West Germanic languages. Old English is the most extremely-different from Old High German of the West Germanic languages, possibly because there's no actual evidence for it being spoken in proximity as it is only recorded in Britain. It's clearly English though in that much of the language we type here is derived from it.
A major theme which either Mr. Huang or the reviewer has overlooked is that the role of Emperor in China is more significantly about unification and preservation of same than temporal power per se.
Just as a king in a feudal structure is ultimately beneficial in adjudicating between the feudal lords at last resort - the Emperor of China is intended to be the focal point upon which Chinese unity is preserved. This is why concepts like the "mandate of Heaven" are important: failure in the form of rebellion or mass suffering as precondition to rebellion are signs that an Emperor is failing in his most basic function. OF course, in reality the size and sheer scale of China in the pre-computer, pre-electrical communications era required devolution of execution of policy; the Hanlin examinations and the Imperial Bureaucracy was created to try and enable extension of Imperial policies to the far-flung corners of China.
If you look at the efforts by certain governors during the late Qing dynasty to build modern industry, for example, in the face of overall higher level bureaucratic indifference - it gives an idea of how such a ponderous bureaucratic beast operates.
But then again, it shouldn't be surprising that a scion of the post-Qing revolutionaries should denigrate the regime that was overthrown - especially since the "democratic" governments of China succeeding the Qing were notable primarily for failing both to improve Chinese society and economy as well as to preserve China's unity.
He's denigrating the regime BEFORE the one that was overthrown.
> I’ll also include the Pinyin version in parentheses where the spelling of the Wade-Giles version is significantly different, like this: Peking (Beijing).
But the Wade-Giles version of 北京 is not significantly different from beijing. It's pei-ching. The name "Peking" has nothing to do with Wade-Giles.
> His personal name combined the characters for “joy” and “king.”
It seems like it would have been incredibly disruptive for such common characters (樂王? Maybe 喜王?) to fall under the imperial name taboo. Particularly in the case of 王, which is now and was then one of the most common surnames in China.
Checking Wikipedia, I see that the Wanli Emperor's name was 翊鈞. Neither character has any sense remotely related to joy or kings. I don't see any mention in the wikipedia article that he changed his name upon taking the throne, though this was done by other emperors if they felt their name would be too disruptive.
What happened here? What name are you referring to?
Maybe he was just joyking.
😁
lol
The second character has the “jun1” sound and is sound/tone as 君, which does mean monarch. A similar explanation exists for the first character 翊, which sounds like 怡 and does mean joy/happy
It sounds like you're suggesting that Wanli was one of the emperors who substituted homophones into his name upon ascending the throne, in order to lessen the burden on everyone else, and wikipedia just isn't mentioning it.
But I don't think that's actually a possibility. All male members[1] of the Ming imperial family were legally required to have names that conformed to the system established by the first Ming emperor. The first character of their name was taken from a generation poem (normal for any classy Chinese family), and the second one included a radical from the 五行, with the radicals progressing through a conventional sequence generation by generation. (As far as I know, this elaboration on the scheme was unique to the Ming imperial family, but I don't know a lot.)
And here are some of the personal names of the Wanli Emperor's brothers:
翊釴
翊鈴
翊鏐
It looks painfully clear that the poem character for Wanli's generation was 翊, not 怡, and the element radical for his generation was 金, which is present in 鈞, but not in 君. He couldn't legally have been named 怡君.
It's possible there was some concept called 怡君 and the Wanli emperor was named 翊鈞 in reference to that. On the other hand, the 汉语大词典 has no entry for 怡君.
[1] Judging by the names of the princesses, they used a generation character in their names too, but not the same one that the boys used. They did not use 五行 radicals - they all seem to have used 女 radicals in the second character of their name. I don't know whether this was also required or just felt to make sense.
Nicely done, Mr. Watts. I didn't know that interesting fact about the "five force" tradition in Ming imperial names. A small correction, really to Julien's idea: 翊 (yì) and 怡 (yí) were and are not homonyms, even though a modern English reader might understandably think they were.
You aren’t wrong, I was merely suggesting a possibility of how the author got “joy king” from WanLi’s name. Who knows until the author themselves explain
All im saying is they they sound similar and may be why the author of this post wrote this.
Also in Chinese it’s very common to use homophones for wit/humor/other purposes which is why I suggested it
A couple of points. The reviewer is clearly not familiar with Chinese or Chinese history, so there are quite a few mistakes of this kind. (For example, "Nurhaci is the founder of the Manchu" makes no sense, but it's easy to get confused in a foreign history.) Huang's book does use Wade-Giles, so the reviewer's right in general. But because major place names were often an exception in texts discussing China (English scholarship used "postal spellings"), he chose a poor example in Peking. No way for the reviewer to know.
I don't have Huang's book so I can't figure out how the reviewer came to make his statement about the Wanli Emperor's personal name. Huang was a good scholar, so if he made that statement there must be a basis for it. The way that the reviewer's sentence is constructed, the implied name would presumably be 瓅 (li), combining "king" 王 (loosely understood, in this case, since the form actually stands for a different character) and 樂 (joy), in a single character. However, no online or print source records a personal name with that character, and my guess is that this is just a misunderstanding of something Huang wrote.
Placed alongside Scott's comment and Jack's response, I think this post is going to look like satire, but I really am this dull.
'Nurhaci is the founder of the Manchu' makes complete sense to me. He created the confederation of Jurchen tribes which then adopted the Manchu national identity. This process involved classifying some incorporated groups together as 'official' clans when they did not in fact have a prior genealogical relationship, so it makes sense to consider him the 'founder' of the people.
Well, "Manchu" is an ethnonym. As you say, Nurhaci brought Jurchen tribes into a confederation, so "Nurchaci was the founder of the Manchu confederacy" would make sense. And the elaboration of common genealogical narratives might translate to, "Nurhaci was the founder of the Manchu national identity" (although it's an odd use of "founder" and the word "Manchu" was not adopted as an ethnonym till after Nurhaci's death). I guessed the reviewer's meaning was intended to be, "Nurhaci was the founder of the Manchu Dynasty," which he retrospectively was regarded to have been by the dynastic cult itself, which referred to him by a Chinese imperial title. But "Nurhaci was the founder of the Manchu" is like "Bismarck was the founder of the German." I don't think the sentence makes sense, and there are various ways to construe what idea the author might have intended. Among the possible ones, the notion you're proposing, "Nurhaci was the founder of the Manchu people" seems simply wrong, although I did suspect this might be what the reviewer meant. The Jurchens were a self-conscious ethnic group, sharing a common language, territory, religion, and tradition long before Nurhaci.
hmm the original sentence was perfectly intelligible to me even if technically a word may have been missing. Doesn't seem sufficient to support your claim that reviewer has shallow knowledge of China matters. You mentioned there are a lot of similar mistakes maybe offer a couple different examples?
Well, it's unkind to pile on. The reviewer acknowledges he's not knowledgeable about China, so it's not a criticism to say he makes some mistakes as a result. At one point in discussing the continuity of Chinese history he comments that the "last century or two" appear different, but actually carry on the continuity. There's not much you can lump together between the last two centuries in China. The first is solidly an extension of the Imperial order--no visitor to 19th century China would have said, "You know, I see continuities with the distant past," because the proper response would have been, "Well, duh!" The last century has been an abrupt break, no matter how much cultural influence the past seems to hold, and discerning continuities is an interesting analytic task. The extinction of the Imperial state in 1911 is a paradigm shift unlike any in China since the third century BCE.
At another point, the reviewer refers to the core curriculum of the exam system as "The Four Classics of Taoism and Confucianism." There is no such corpus. The "Four Books and Five Classics" is the standard term for the Confucian classical canon; Taoism had little role to play in the exam curriculum, but its two earliest texts (contemporary with the Four Books) were universally known and admired (and still are). This sort of muddle is like the error of taking "Peking" to be Wade-Giles transcription, and my point was that missteps like these don't really matter here. They don't affect the reviewer's goals or the perspective he's trying to convey--he's representing himself honestly as a newcomer to Chinese history, and it's unfair to ask that he show command of the details to convey an outsider perspective.
By the way, what did you take his sentence about Nurhaci to mean? I actually thought he'd simply left off an -s ("founder of the Manchus"), and that it was 50/50 whether he meant the ethnic group or the Dynastic line, with a little overage odds on something else, like TheBard's "national identity" or military system, etc.
Hi - anonymous reviewer here - for some reason I thought "Manchu" was both plural and singular, like "moose." Good to know it should be either "Manchus" or "Manchu confederacy" (in my mind, those are approximately the same thing). And yeah, I assumed anything with "old-school spelling" was Wade-Giles, hence "Peking." Thanks for the info!
Wikipedia presents Wanli, the regnal name that he took on receiving the mandate of heaven, in traditional characters as: 萬曆帝
I get:
萬 = great number (usually translated as 10,000)
曆 = calendar
帝 = heaven's son (which we usually translate as Emperor)
I suspect that 萬曆 would translate roughly as "Great Age Son of Heaven" as in Emperor of an Age of Greatness (as in an age that will live for 10,000 years).
HIs given name was 朱翊鈞.
朱 = Vermillion, which is an imperial color as well as being a surname
翊 = the most likely meaning of this character is respect (IMO)
鈞 = and jūn is an honorific, isn't it? Noble, honorable.
So, Vermillion, Worthy of Respect, or Vermillion Noble Respect, is my take on his given name. I don't know where the author got Joy from.
Reign titles are an unusual Chinese institution. Emperors were responsible for setting the annual calendar (advised by specialists in the bureaucracy), because the solunar calendar used in traditional China required constant adjustment to track the solar (agricultural) year, using leap months (5 every 17 years, if I recall--think of how "Chinese New Year" jumps around). There was no tradition of consecutive year dating: years were designated by a 60-item (sexagenary) cycle that kept recurring, so, for example, 2022 is designated identically with 1962. Reign-period dating was a device to give each year an individual designation.
Starting in 163 BCE, the Chinese emperors would declare reign period designations with elegant, two-character titles, and years were designated on the formula XX #, as in Wan-li 15 (roughly, 1587). Emperors could replace reign titles with new ones as they wished--Empress Wu of the Tang period, China's only fully acknowledged female emperor, used 16 different reign titles over a period of 21 years, changing in mid-year several times. None of these reign titles had anything to do with the emperor's name. Emperors had a personal name (e.g., 朱翊鈞 --朱,by the way, has nothing to do with being an imperial color; it's a common surname, and the Ming founder bore it as a child, when he was a poor farmer's orphan, a monk in a failing monastery, and a beggar . . . his fortunes changed), and they also had an imperial name, unique to them within a dynasty (although often repeated among dynasties). Zhu Yijun's 朱翊鈞 imperial name was Shenzong 神宗. He is "Emperor Shenzong." He is also "*The* Wanli Emperor," but only because the Ming ditched the custom of changing reign titles at will, and set a precedent of one per emperor, so emperors for the first time could be referred to by their reign names, which held through 1911.
Wanli 萬曆 is a pretty orthodox reign title. It means 10,000 (innumerable) calendar[-years]. In Chinese, "10,000 years" (wansui 萬歲) is a traditional wish for an emperor ("May the king live forever!"). It's more recognizable to Americans in its Japanese form: "banzai!"--written identically-- which many of us Boomers learned as the enthusiastic cry of kamikaze pilots in World War II as they tried to immolate themselves by crashing into and sinking US warships. (In fact, that emperor did live a very long time indeed.) Wanli's choice is a prediction that his reign would be long, and it turned out to be a prescient selection.
So the Wanli Emperor had two names (actually, he had more, but I want to avoid any hint of detail here): his personal name, Zhu Yijun, and his imperial name, Shenzong. The "zong 宗" in Shenzong means "ancestor," and was used as an honorific in the imperial names of all but the last Ming emperor. The word "shen 神" means "spirit," "sentient," "amazing," and other senses associated with the idea of a life-force in people that also lives on after death in some ghostly sense. It's conceivable that Ray Huang knew of some usage of "shen" that could be construed as joyful, in which case, he might have said that "Shenzong" meant joyful king. "Joyful" is not one of the sixteen definitions I find for 神 in encyclopedic dictionaries, but who could deny that it is joyful to be sentient? However, there's a certain irony in this, because imperial names such as Shenzong were bestowed only at the point of post-sentience, the dynastic successor bestowing the name upon his recently deceased predecessor (usually, Dad). That's why the last Ming emperor does not have such a name. Of course, the Wanli emperor's son might have been joyful to finally have the opportunity to name his father while he himself was still sentient. Sadly, he was dead within less than a month, having, according to the histories, overindulged in the joy of his new harem. (Take warning, Prince Charles!)
Thanks for the detailed comment! Fascinating! But for which names did the Imperial naming taboo apply? For their reign period names? Or their other names?
I believe the naming taboo applies to the name the Emperor used before becoming Emperor. The other names were ways to avoid using the taboo name.
I figure the naming taboo didn't apply to the family name; if it did the whole imperial family would have to change their name whenever there was a new Emperor.