Today is my first day back at work and it promises to be a busy one, but January 8th is such a juicy day in Chinese history I couldn’t leave it alone.
In 141 A.D. Han Wudi, an emperor much beloved by territorial chauvanists and future generations of Confucian beareaucrats, ascended the throne. During his 69 years in power, he would greatly expand the reach of the Han Empire, order China’s first census, and, on the advice of scholars such as Dong Zhongshu (179-104), proclaim Confucianism (or at least a version thereof) as the imperial ideology. Han Wudi, as any one of several Chinese telenovelas will beat into your skull, was all about the expansion of power and the centralization of the authority.
On January 8, 881, Huang Chao, he of the eponymous rebellion, sacked the Tang capital at Chang’an. The Tang had been in steady decline for nearly a century following the An Lushan Rebellion, and while the Huang Chao Rebellion might not have been the final blow, it didn’t help. Kind of like that time in college you booted all over your date. That last double shot of Cuervo probably wasn’t the only reason, there were three funnels of beer preceding it, but it certainly didn’t help. In any case, three years after taking the city and establishing his own “Great Qi” Dynasty, Huang Chao was chased out by loyalist Tang forces and eventually committed suicide rather than be taken alive.
Today should really be a holiday for translators of any languge, but especially Chinese because January 8 is the birthday of perhaps the most influential translator in recent Chinese history, Yan Fu (1854-1921). At a time when translations of foreign books were scarce, Yan Fu rolled out a stunning set of works including Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Herbert Spencer’s Study of Sociology. While some might quibble with his translations (his notions of individualism would have puzzled Mills and Yan Fu read Spencer as being more prescriptive than descriptive, a slight change of empahsis with lasting consequences) few others influenced the intellectual culture of the late 19th and early 20th century like Yan Fu.
On this date in 1902, Empress Dowager Cixi (with the Guangxu Emperor in tow) returned from her exile in Xian. She had fled there following the invasion of Beijing by the Allied Expeditionary Force sent in 1900 to quell the Boxer Uprising.
Finally, on January 8, 1976 Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai finally succumbed to cancer. His death would touch off a wave of memorials and demonstrations which shook the surviving leadership, especially the Gang of Four, and led to the ouster (yet again) of Deng Xiaoping.
