The History of China (and a little bit of urology)

So I have have to admit I'm a little bit stuck with learning Mandarin. My wife Carolyn tells me that watching a couple of videos on YouTube is clear evidence of lack of commitment. She recommends I spend two years in Beijing doing a full-immersion language program. I didn't agree and told her that the real reason for me experiencing a "Mandarin-block" is the fact that one can only truly understand the language - and it's many subtleties - in the context China's long and rich history. So what we're going to do this week is delve into China's past. Chinese History Lesson 1:


Let's keep it simple and start at the end: The Qing dynasty was the last ruling dynasty of China, which covered the period between 1644 and 1911. According to chinaknowledge.de, this age of the Qing dynasty is characterized by "a period of prosperity, of decay, of stagnation, of revolution, of lazyness and of challenges that came upon a population that seemed to sleep a beauty's sleep of Confucian social ethics in a paradise where a wise ruler governed over a satified and happy population, and on the other side a society that was bound by rules of a backward social thinking."

The end of the Qing dynasty marked the end of Imperial China, and the beginning of the Republic of China. Instead of writing a long essay about the transition from "Ancient China" to "Modern China", I decided to show you a single picture. It's a photograph (by Henri Cartier-Bresson) of a eunuch of the Imperial court of the Qing dynasty:

The photo was taken in 1948, decades after the the Qing dynasty ended, and less than one year before Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic. This is a photo of a man caught between two worlds, a lost soul. And in the eyes of many, eunuchs were not even considered men at all! To find out why - and to learn a little bit about eunuchs in general - we need help from the science of urology. Have a quick look at page 139 (section "results and conclusions") of the following document. Don't worry, it's not too much text!

With this bit of urological information in mind I have another look at the above photograph and find it incredibly moving: One man who symbolizes China's struggle to become a modern nation - something that's still very relevant today.