"Judith Tarr - Silk Roads And Shadows" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tarr Judith)

SILK ROADS AND SHADOWS [011-03-4.7]

BY: JUDITH TARR

Category: fiction fantasy

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to express my thanks to Dr. Marsha
Wagner, Vice President for instruction at
the China Institute in New York City, as
well as to Sandra Miesel for articles on
T'ang tombs and the Simposh (now, after a forced
conversion to Islam, called Nuristanis), and
to Andre Norton. With characteristic generosity, she shared
a twenty year collection of books on China, and
gave me the Bowman, Spearman, and
Officer.


NOTE
The Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting
times," definitely applies to the mid-ninth
century, when
Silk Roads and Shadows
takes place. In Byzantium, this period saw
the overthrow of the Amorian dynasty with the assassination
of Michael III, "the Drunkard," and
possibly one of the worst emperors (842-867) in
the Empire's history, by his
erSTwhile-favorite, Basil, subsequently the
founder of the Macedonian dynasty.
In T'ang dynasty China, already shaken by the
attempts at revolution a century earlier, a
Taoist emperor did indeed launch a purge of
foreign religions (including Buddhism) that made
England's dissolution of the monasteries centuries
later look like an afternoon's peaceful leafletting.
Western readers who like to think of Taoism as a
benign cult that stresses unity with nature may be
warned that nature also involves earthquakes and
typhoons-and offers an emperor no reason why he
should avoid these particular manifestations either.
Such actions changed China irrevocably. Before
842, the mania in China for things Western can only
be compared to our present-day fascination for things
Chinese. After 842, China turned increasingly
xenophobic. Ultimately the country withdrew behind
its walls from world trade.
Readers interested in the legend of Shambhala (from which
James Hilton probably drew his classic