Astral Codex Ten

Huang

3 min read

Huang

Article

Huang is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 19, 2022 and January 17, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “here’s a clearly legitimate example from Huang’s book”; “‘Huang provides several examples, describing scenes that illustrate the grandeur of empire.’”; “Huang’s chapter headings reminded me of Borges’ short story titles”. It most often appears alongside China, 1587, 1587.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: August 19, 2022
  • Last seen: January 17, 2025

Appears In

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.

Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance
August 19, 2022 · Original source
This book, by Ray Huang, was first published in the early 1980s; I came across it only recently as a recommendation on The Scholar's Stage (a blog which I found through some link on ACX/SSC a while back.)
Inline links: The Scholar's Stage, ACX, SSC
Like Edward Gibbon's monumental Decline and Fall..., Ray Huang’s 1587 also tells the tale of a slowly decaying empire: in this case, the Ming dynasty of China.
Mercifully, Huang's book is much shorter than Gibbon's multi-volume epic.
Links For January 2025
January 17, 2025 · Original source
47: From Wikipedia’s bio of Jensen Huang:
Inline links: Wikipedia’s bio of Jensen Huang
Both Huang's aunt and uncle were recent immigrants to Washington state; they accidentally enrolled him and his brother in the Oneida Baptist Institute, a religious reform academy in Kentucky for troubled youth,mistakenly believing it to be a prestigious boarding school. Jensen's parents sold nearly all their possessions in order to afford the academy's tuition […]
[He] was frequently bullied and beaten. In Oneida, Huang cleaned toilets everyday, learned to play table-tennis, joined the swimming team, and appeared in Sports Illustrated at age 14. He taught his illiterate roommate, a "17-year-old covered in tattoos and knife scars," how to read in exchange for being taught how to bench press. In 2002, Huang recalled that he remembered his life in Kentucky "more vividly than just about any other".