When China was open to the world:

All things foreign were the rage. Aristocrats learned to sit in chairs, the “barbarian beds.” Dandies preferred to speak Turkish, and set up blue felt nomadic tents in their urban courtyards, where they dressed like khans and ate chunks of lamb that they cut off with swords. Courtesans sang songs with titles like “Watching the Moon in Brahman Land,” playing melodies on foreign instruments adapted from Indian, Turkish, Korean, and Persian tunes. Entertainment was provided by dancers from Tashkent or the Sogdian “twirling girls” who performed balancing on giant balls. Saffron-flavored wine, made from grapes imported from Turkey, was served in agate cups, poured in the Pleasure Quarters by blue-eyed geishas. “When I drink this,” said the emperor Mu Tsung, “I am instantly conscious of harmony suffusing my four limbs—it is the true Princeling of Grand Tranquility”—the latter being an honorific for Lao Tzu, the Taoist sage.

It was a time of inordinate leisure. Mandarins were given fifty-eight days off during the year to celebrate twenty-eight holidays. There were holidays for viewing the moon and for attempts to outshine it. (One emperor erected a lantern tree two hundred feet tall with 50,000 oil cups lit by a thousand palace women costumed in brocade.) Periodically the emperor would declare a three-day carnival in the streets, with floats five stories high carrying acrobats swinging on poles, musicians, and singers. In the palace, the bureaucratic office known as the Service of Radiant Emolument was in charge of imperial banquets; the cooking alone was handled by a staff of two thousand, preparing such rare dishes as steamed bear claw, Bactrian camel hump, jellyfish with cinnamon, proboscis monkey soup with five flavors, barbequed elephant trunk, and, in summer, melons that were kept cool in jade urns of ice brought down from the mountains. The aristocracy wanted it all to last forever; they drank strange elixirs concocted by Indian charlatans and Taoist alchemists that would promote longevity or even ensure immortality. It is said that five of the T’ang emperors died from these potions.

Bones and pottery from the Shang and Zhou Dynasties were damaged by railway construction workers:

“SHANGHAI (AFP) - - A Chinese construction company severely damaged relics dating back more than 3,000 years while building a section of a high-speed rail linking Beijing and Shanghai, state media reported Tuesday.

Work was halted on the section of rail in the eastern city of Nanjing and the company faces a fine of up to 500,000 yuan (73,000 dollars) for ignoring warnings that the site contained ancient treasures, the China Daily said.”

Musings on a rare oracle bone, new to UC Berkeley’s holdings:

“‘He reached into his raincoat pocket and said, ‘Here, I’ve got something for you,’ ’ Keightley recalled in his prepared remarks for the dedication of the new library’s building site. ‘He gave me a genuine Shang Dynasty oracle bone fragment, which he had obtained during his days as a White Russian refugee in Harbin.’

The late Boodberg - who spent his childhood in Vladivostok, where his father commanded the Czarist forces - viewed the study of ancient language as ‘the ability to conduct significant conversations with the dead.’ …

Keightley said the inscription on the bone he gave to the library says, ‘On guihai (day 60), (the diviner) made cracks and divined: ‘In the next 10 days, there will be no disasters.’ ‘”

School children from three years on learn Confucius in Zhengzhou:

“To learn and to practice what is learned time and again is pleasure, is it not? To have friends from afar is happiness, is it not?”

A Michigan chemistry professor enthuses about China’s changes:

“As American scientists, my colleagues and I have been accustomed to thinking of the United States as the destination for scientific training for the past 60 years. The caricature of science in China is what we disparagingly call doing ‘turn the crank’ experiments: no invention, perhaps not even a strong sense for the fundamental theory behind the buttons being pushed on the equipment, and the generation of experimental data without a strong critical sense to sort out the wheat from the chaff. In fact, this was neither universal nor the norm. Placed in the context of history, the progress made by Chinese science was spectacular. Especially when you consider that it effectively did not exist from 1949-1980, a time during which Western science grew enormously. In twenty years’ time, 1980-2000, much of science had rebooted to levels that were in places only about a decade behind us, and in other places right up to date. In the past eight years, this gap has narrowed.

Politically and socially, I was not prepared for the openness I found. As an elementary school kid in the 1960s, I learned how to crouch under my desk to protect myself from the fallout from Commie bombs. I think I still had lingering impressions of what life in a Communist State would look and sound like. I had lots of frank questions for my hosts and guides, and the candid answers surprised me. I recall being particularly curious about the one-child policy, and the endless array of exceptions to it. The provision that mixed marriages were excluded, for example, seemed at least consistent with the obvious number of young Chinese girls on the arms of Western boys.”

Did Marco Polo go to China, or did he make it all up?

“Like others who have examined his writings closely, I am dismayed by his omissions and floored by his whoppers. But I am ultimately convinced of his essential truthfulness. Why? For one thing, his itineraries, as laid out by the sequence of book chapters, are fundamentally accurate, whether he’s crossing Central Asia or central China. Where did he acquire that geographical information if he didn’t make these journeys himself? No skeptical investigator has ever proved that he copied from some Arab or Chinese source. And while it’s true that Polo is guilty of curious omissions (those chopsticks, for example), he expanded medieval Europe’s meager knowledge of Asia with such hitherto-unknown names as Cipangu, Java, Zanzibar and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), besides identifying China’s great cities and describing such features as the Takla Makan Desert and the Yangtze River. Having followed Polo’s tracks, I know firsthand that he also got many things right, such as: both lapis lazuli and rubies are found in the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan; in China’s southwest a minority people eat raw flesh; people in Sumatra and Sri Lanka make a joy juice from fermented palm tree sap.”

When China’s rulers declared martial law on June 4, 1989, they were following one of the oldest tenets of Chinese rule:

“The student demonstrators in the square may have lacked a coherent message. The atmosphere may have taken on aspects of a carnival. But, underlying it all, was a basic questioning of the right of the Communist Party to exercise monopoly power, a demand for discussion and plurality.

“That questioned a tenet of Chinese rule dating back to the First Emperor of 221BC. The doctrine of legalism - rule by law rather than rule of law - co-existed with the more benevolent strains of Confucianism. Mao had identified himself with the First Emperor, and in 1980, Deng and his colleagues were in no mood to cede the authority they had spent all their lives fighting for.

“Their decision to declare martial law and send in the People’s Liberation Army was not taken lightly. As shown in the smuggled-out records in the book, the Tiananmen Papers, they deliberated long and hard, often in deep disgruntlement as they discussed how to deal with the pesky students who could draw on the traditional esteem in which their class was held in China. Reformists in the leadership, led by the party secretary, Zhao Ziyang, tried to find an accommodation. By the beginning of June, some student leaders were ready to return to campus and build on the moral victory they had won since launching the protest in mid-April. But the moderates were overruled on both sides and the tragic result unfolded.”

Joseph Needham was an avid nudist, an accordion player, and a participant in “a wife-approved decades-long affair with the love of his life, a Chinese woman named Lu Gwei-djen.” In his new book, Simon Winchester confronts the “Needham question.”