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The remarkable 17th and 18th century rulers celebrated
by the Three
Emperors exhibition at the Royal Academy prompt questions about
the
extraordinarily long-lived bureaucratic monarchy in China, first
imposed
by the First Emperor of the Qin in the 3rd century BC, and ended
only in 1912.
This talk will ask how a system that apparently concentrated so
much power
in the hands of one man could survive for over 2,000 years despite
the fact
that any hereditary monarchy must have its share of incompetent
rulers.
How did the palace and the court relate to the officials who actually
ran the
country, and how did the emperor affect his subjects? Where did
an emperor
fit in, what did he do, and what difference could one make?
Bill Jenner’s books include Memories of Loyang, a study of
the sixth-century
capital of north China, and The Tyranny of History: the roots of
China’s crisis.
He has translated From Emperor to Citizen, the ghosted autobiography
of the
last emperor; the 16th-century fantasy novel Journey to the West;
and much
other Chinese literature. He was Professor of Chinese at the Australian
National University and is now writing the first volume of a history
of China
as a professorial research associate at the School of Oriental and
African Studies. |
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