Astral Codex Ten

Peking

3 min read

Peking

Article

Peking is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 03, 2022 and August 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Peking, China, December, 1948”; “Peking (Beijing)”; “located inside the much larger city of Peking (Beijing)“. It most often appears alongside China, emperor, Europe.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: June 03, 2022
  • Last seen: August 19, 2022

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: The Castrato
June 03, 2022 · Original source
Henri Cartier-Bresson - Eunuch of the Imperial Court of the Last Dynasty, Peking, China, December, 1948 (source). The number of eunuchs in Imperial employ fell to 470 by 1912, when the practice of using them ceased (wikipedia). Lessons and Speculations I know this is a very rare thing from historians (professionals or complete amateurs like myself) and you’ll probably be shocked to hear this, but I think there are some valuable lessons to be learned from the history of the castrati and eunuchs more generally. I’ll try to keep it brief as I know this review has dragged on long enough, but frankly after all this work I feel I’ve earned the right to share a few of my own thoughts and (wild) speculations.
Inline links: source, wikipedia, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!vJ1v!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa6fc0906-9c33-4c8a-b2b1-dcff0fab8838_578x828.png
Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance
August 19, 2022 · Original source
It’s challenging to represent Chinese words in alphabetical form; the Wade-Giles and Pinyin approaches are the two main methods. This book, from 1981, uses the older Wade-Giles system. On the other hand, a nice benefit of this book's age is that it remains blessedly uncontaminated by any current “culture war” toxicity. Many of the main characters have Wikipedia pages under the newer Pinyin versions of their names, which I'll link. I’ll also include the Pinyin version in parentheses where the spelling of the Wade-Giles version is significantly different, like this: Peking (Beijing).
For about 500 years the Forbidden City, surrounded by a moat and located inside the much larger city of Peking (Beijing), was the nucleus of the Chinese Empire. It had been created several generations earlier at the behest of the Ming dynasty’s third emperor (Wan-li was the 14th). This giant, rambling palace outlived the dynasty which created it, and went on to serve as the headquarters of the subsequent and final Ching (Qing) dynasty as well.
“block printing was in wide public use… anonymous pamphlets and pseudonymous literature appeared in Peking to stir up and intensify the controversy”.