emperor
Article
emperor is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between June 03, 2022 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “In 1732 he got an audience with the emperor and told him”; “the young Emperor, who even presented Shen with a specially commissioned jacket”; “the emperor (who lived a cloistered life in Kyoto)“. It most often appears alongside Europe, God, Black Death.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: June 03, 2022
- Last seen: August 01, 2025
Appears In
- Your Book Review: The Castrato
- Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance
- Your Book Review: Autobiography Of Yukichi Fukuzawa
- Lives Of The Rationalist Saints
- Your Review: Joan of Arc
Related Pages
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- Europe (4 shared issues)
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- God (3 shared issues)
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- Black Death (2 shared issues)
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- Byzantine empire (2 shared issues)
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- Catholic (2 shared issues)
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- Confucius (2 shared issues)
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- Egypt (2 shared issues)
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- English (2 shared issues)
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- Italy (2 shared issues)
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- Japan (2 shared issues)
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- London (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
“In 1732 he got an audience with the emperor and told him, all atremble, that it was the most fortunate moment in his life. After Farinelli sang magnificently, “as god wished”, the emperor exclaimed in Neapolitan, “Voi siete Napoliello” (You’re a Neapolitan), and Farinelli made him laugh with a riposte that echoed the emperor’s facility with dialect by declaring in napoletano, “I am indeed one of those true pasta-eaters.” When they met again and the emperor asked him about a rumor that he’d lost money to a bad creditor, again Farinelli broke up the room by answering that since he had earned the money with his trills, he had reason to hope they would bring him more in the future.”
Before turning from the past to the present and future, a brief word should be said about the wider history of eunuchs. The Castrati were not unique simply because of their eunuch status; what made them unique was the fact that they formed a special caste of individuals who were systematically produced for purely artistic purposes over a period of three centuries. That some of the castrati came to also serve as trusted members of royal courts was actually par for the course. Since the dawn of civilization, eunuchs have served rulers from across the world (notably in the Assyrian, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires, and in various Chinese dynasties) in a variety of roles—domestic servants, cuckold-free harem guards, advisors, and spies (there was some historical basis for Varys, the eunuch spymaster from Game of Thrones). Eunuchs were preferred for these roles for obvious reasons: it was presumed that they could be trusted to a greater degree than non-eunuch males and females as they would be less interested in seizing dynastic power (no offspring to which they could pass on their rule) and less power hungry in general (and their lack of family ties meant it was easier to kill or exile them without retribution). History doesn’t offer a clear verdict on whether or not the presumption of greater trustworthiness was warranted, but examples of eunuchs who were decidedly not trustworthy—because they usurped the rulers who employed them—are not hard to find. This was a particularly common theme in Chinese history where eunuchs served emperors, and sometimes became emperors themselves (Liu Jin and Wei Zhongxian), for over 2000 years, from the Qin dynasty (200s BC) up until the abdication of the last Qing emperor in 1912 (Sun Yaoting, the last imperial eunuch, died in 1996).
The settings and characters certainly lend themselves to the tropes of fantasy fiction: the Forbidden City, the Emperor's Tomb, the Gate of Polar Convergence, the Literary Depth Pavilion - so many evocative names. The action involves floggings, concubines, eunuchs, dynastic scheming, and battles with Japanese pirates. Yet this is not some bodice-ripping work of historical fiction: it's well-sourced and vetted history, with plenty of primary source citations.
Here's a telling example of his approach, where he's talking about the fancy outfits the Chinese emperors used to wear. He notes that, unlike European royalty: “Ming emperors wore no metal crowns”.
This points toward an old and deep aspect of Chinese culture: the belief that stillness holds great power and should be cultivated. This is true whether you’re a soldier, a preschooler, or the emperor of China.
Finally, those who were dissatisfied with the status quo were quick to point out that the shogun nominally ruled at the pleasure of the emperor (who lived a cloistered life in Kyoto under the shogunate’s watchful eye). This imperial imprimatur had previously cemented the shogun’s legitimacy. But it suddenly seemed like a massive vulnerability. If the emperor had authorized the shogunate, the thinking went, he could also dissolve it.
St. Felix publicly declared that he believed with 79% probability that COVID had a natural origin. He was brought before the Emperor, who threatened him with execution unless he updated to 100%. When St. Felix refused, the Emperor was impressed with his integrity, and said he would release him if he merely updated to 90%. St. Felix refused again, and the Emperor, fearing revolt, promised to release him if he merely rounded up one percentage point to 80%. St. Felix cited Tetlock’s research showing that the last digit contained useful information, refused a third time, and was crucified.
She didn’t keep quiet. When the Emperor arrived in Alexandria for a festival, this festival included gladiatorial games and chariot races and feasting and drinking, and, of course, the best part - feeding Christians to lions. The prefect’s daughter telling the Emperor he was wrong to feed Christians to lions might have been pardonable softheartedness if it was just that she disliked watching slaves fed to lions, but her telling him that he was wrong because the Christians were right and he was wrong was flatly unacceptable. He had no more interest in offending her parents than anyone else, though (and, in fact, he was considering putting his wife aside and marrying her - a useful alliance and she had brains and guts) so instead he called on his top fifty philosophers to outargue her.
Instead she converted half of them to Christianity, so he had to have them killed. That was the point where he threw her in prison, hoping she’d change her mind and be sensible. Instead she converted everyone who showed up to argue with her in prison; when he deprived her of food she was fed by a dove, when he had her tortured her wounds miraculously healed. When his wife tried to talk sense into her, she converted and the Emperor had to have her killed, too, so since the slot was empty he, as a final try, proposed marriage to Catherine. She told him she had a better husband - Christ - and at that insult he condemned her to death. The first try failed when the breaking wheel shattered at her touch; the second try employed an axe, but though the blade struck true milk flowed from the stump instead of blood.
Basilica: I'm a Christian and I don't buy it. Brilliant people in the fourth century and in the sixteenth century and in the twentieth century study their Bibles, read theologians, and come up with heresies conclusively condemned by Athanasius. Indeed, we observe that all these brilliant people assembled in the fourth century produced dozens of close church councils which the Emperor tried to shape to whatever was most politically useful, and then later centuries saw hundreds of extremely corrupt papal elections between would-be Popes where the Cardinals were paid vast sums to vote for the candidate who paid most, some of which produced Popes who made historically-vital rulings for utterly cynical reasons. If God is real, maybe the Council of Nicaea was divinely inspired; but if God isn't real, theology is men looking at their reflection, quarreling about it, and then voting to decide who to kill for being in the minority. If everyone who doesn't study theology in the twelfth century is a heretic, and everyone who doesn't study theology in the twentieth century is a heretic, shouldn't Joan have just been a heretic?