Brendan O’Kane
@bokane.org
7.4K followers 3.8K following 16K posts
Scrutable Occidental, erstwhile 北漂, quondam translator, Ming/Qing fiction enjoyer, congenital Philadelphian, escaped academic, MLIS aspirant, 鏟屎官 (二等). Cynicism makes you an easy mark. Signal: @bokane.1644. www.burninghou.se
![crop from John Cikoski's 'Lexicon of Old Chinese': the digraph 䰰䰰 is glossed as "sound [a] spook makes" and given the goofy-sounding-to-me reconstructed reading given here in Karlgren's notation](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ycbmujtxprrwbkiw3x5qsyz4/bafkreid7uszeafdcat4kinttzdayilkogt7fjfuqx4wodoejuqopbfzyfq)
![John Cikoski, A Lexicon of Classical Chinese, x:
Syllabaries are hardly less efficient if the number of distinct syllables is not large. In Old Chinese it is. Over 3800 syllables are distinguished in 廣韻, and Archaic Chinese had more. That would be a burden if each syllable had one symbol, but in Chinese writing we find the inventory multiplied ten-fold. It is the worst script in the world, save only one, and that one is derived from it. (I mean of course the one Sir George Sansom called “surely without inferiors” ['Historical Grammar of Japanese', Oxford UP 1928, p. 44], the monumental junk-sculpture of a script that the Japanese have made by remorseless bricolage of Chinese books.)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ycbmujtxprrwbkiw3x5qsyz4/bafkreieqnoiydyvkomphkujatsp6qugea5vfyfsbw2dh3yqigsgkys3amm)
![Vertical scroll: a muted ink rendering of a somewhat boneless-looking tabby with a white belly and socks, three paws planted on the ground with its left rear leg raised to scratch behind its ear. Its eyes are wide; its teeth are sharp; it looks like a painting of a ferocious tiger scaled down to cat size and caught in a goofy pose.
At the top right, an inscription slightly misquotes Huang Tingjian's "cat plz" poem and says 'Since I lost my cat, the mice have been running riot and making mischief in my studio. I heard that Huxi's [i.e. Shen Tianmin's] household has kittens, so I wrote and painted this to engage one.' (此山谷先生乞貓詩也。小齋近失狸，苦鼠輩作孽，聞滸溪家有乳貓，寫此並畫聘之)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ycbmujtxprrwbkiw3x5qsyz4/bafkreiewuhetdhd7257os7exxztbptsqdh7qo6pdblftnjg4rwkabdik3q)
!['Reception' section of the wikipedia article for 'Jade Warrior,' the wuxia kalevala movie:
"The reception of the Jade Warrior was critical in China. Reviews in local newspapers criticized the film as difficult to understand: it takes place both in Finland and China and even in different time periods. In addition, the Mandarin pronunciation of the Finnish actors was considered ridiculous rather than good.[5]"](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ycbmujtxprrwbkiw3x5qsyz4/bafkreia2tndwcdrjqibfnga6cnhlnajmfd65jql4hosrtebo5prkqug5m4)
![from the start of Timothy Brook’s excellent “The Troubled Empire”:
Shen [Defu] is able to align every sighting with a precise moment in that emperor's wobbly career, including the man's death. Zhengde died of a fever some weeks after falling drunk out of a boat while fishing in the Yangzi valley. Water being the dragon's signature element, Shen dared to suggest that dragons must have been responsible.
From here on, dragons are regular
accompanists to the Ming emperors as they stumbled from one constitutional or environmental crisis to the next. The reign of Zhengde's successor, the Jiajing emperor (r I522-I566), was heavily troubled by dragons, especially in the I55os. Eighteen spottings can be precisely dated, but many more have been recorded that cannot. A Yangzi delta writer who collected local dragon stories from the Jiajing reign tells of one appearing in the home of a Hangzhou veterinarian, a second tearing up massive pine trees as it crossed Fang Mountain outside Hangzhou, a third and a fourth destroying dozens of houses outside Suzhou in a fiery heat, and a fifth roiling about over Hangzhou's scenic West Lake, where it toppled an iron pagoda, overturned](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ycbmujtxprrwbkiw3x5qsyz4/bafkreibbdl3kpxdcp7frythtkrnabccw2dlk6icscclq6vxav4curxf7ii)
![Actual Wikipedia:
Possible causes:
The cause of the explosion has never been conclusively determined. Although there are multiple sources of detailed historical records, the incident happened well before the proliferation of modern science in China, and contemporary interpretations are compounded with superstitious speculations.
There were also suspicions that the official account might have been exaggerated with tints of yellow journalism. Throughout the ages, various hypotheses have been put forth, including a gunpowder explosion, a meteor air burst, a natural gas explosion and even a volcanic eruption. 2] Despite some being regarded as scientifically plausible, no academic consensus has been reached.
Gunpowder
Due to the epicenter of the disaster, the Wanggongchang Armory, being a military storage facility that "dispatches 3000 catties (about 1.8 metric tons) of gunpowder every five days", an accidental gunpowder ignition was blamed as the culprit from the very beginning. The cause has been suspected to be poor handling during manufacturing and transport, electrostatic discharges or even sabotage by Later Jin spies, and is sometimes cited as proof of the decline in the Ming government's administrative quality.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ycbmujtxprrwbkiw3x5qsyz4/bafkreig265t4emvrq4gtt5f53ecfft5khitix62wh4itjd7xmffimcivpy)
