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Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

cyber.harvard.edu

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Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#81

Post by rawgabbit »

singularity2001 wrote: post #19
bshepard wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is important to stress that China was ruled, at the time, by a government that was widely seen as "Nonchinese" -- this sense of external rule surely had a great deal to do with the emergence of mass addiction, as the Ching state that imposed the laws had serious legitimacy issues (and would collapse less than a century later.)

How was it nonchinese?

https://www.history.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/Evelyn-Rawsk... Professor Evelyn Rawski of U of Pittsburg explained that the last Chinese dynasty was the Qing who were ethnically Manchu. They saw themselves as ruling five different peoples: Han China, Manchuria, Mongolia, Uighurs, and Tibet. She argues that sinicization is a modern invention.

Quotes from the PDF "What is at issue is not the magnitude of Qing achievement, but Ho's statement that "the key to its [Qing] success was the adoption by early Manchu rulers of a policy of systematic sinicization". The new scholarship suggests just the opposite: the key to Qing success, at least in terms of empire-building, lay in its ability to use its cultural links with the non-Han peoples of Inner Asia and to differentiate the administration of the non-Han regions from the administration of the former Ming provinces."

""Sinicization" -- the thesis that all of the non-Han peoples who have entered the Chinese realm have eventually been assimilated into Chinese culture -- is a twentieth century Han nationalist interpretation of China's past."

Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#82

Post by [deleted] »

Hayvok wrote: post #78
revolvingocelot wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>queue ...aeons ago, mixing up cue and queue would have been considered an eggcorn. [0] Nowadays, however, "queue" is perfectly cromulent to use in this idiom: the first Opium War has been added to the end of the playlist, and will soon commence. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn

Thanks for writing this (and teaching me what an eggcorn is) - it made me laugh. However, I think I'll chalk my use of "queue" rather than "cue" to it being 1 AM when I wrote the comment. :)

[deleted]

Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#83

Post by 99_00 »

rnvannatta wrote: post #75
99_00 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it possible that the England had nothing China wanted to buy when England was so technologically superior that they were able to defeat China's military, fighting in China, on the other side of the planet, outnumbered 10 to 1?

The same smugness and sense of superiority that China held for England, was also held by England for China. As such, the English only primarily tried to sell knickknacks and things the Chinese could produce better. This ended up backfiring and cementing the view to the Chinese that the English were simple barbarians. They did indeed have weapons the Chinese (and other nations) wanted, but only sold a limited amount o…

There are reasons you wouldn't sell your best military tech to a country other than them being on your list to be taken over.

Traditionally, in history and now, you sell your best military tech to your strongest allies, and not to random countries.

It was difficult to sell into China because import was monopolized by a few Chinese firms and geographically restricted.

To say that preindustrial China wouldn't benefit from good produced in industrialized Britian or America is highly suspect and defies common sense.

Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#84

Post by LAC-Tech »

inkyoto wrote: post #56
LAC-Tech wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the people he wrote that letter to didnt see them as equals. Did that letter suggest the British were seen as equals? The phrase "barbarian" is used 16 times in the text... --- "The kings of your honorable country by a tradition handed down from generation to generation have always been noted for their politeness and submissiveness." "Privately we are delighted with the way in which the honorable rulers…

> Did that letter suggest the British were seen as equals? No. Chinese emperors saw every other state outside the Celestial Empire as a tributary state and expected a full submission to the Chinese emperor, hence the language. > The phrase "barbarian" is used 16 times in the text «Barbarian» (蠻夷) was a term to refer to anyone else other than a direct subject of the Chinese Empire. Only the Chinese people were conside…

Thanks for this breakdown. Do you have confirmation that 蠻夷 was what was used in the original text?

Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#85

Post by itbeho »

anonymousiam wrote: post #73
itbeho wrote: post #72

Makes one wonder about the flood of fentanyl coming in to the US from China.

It did not get much media coverage, but when Donald Trump was giving a speech in Las Vegas last week, he suggested that stricter laws for Fentanyl trafficking should be enacted, including capital punishment. Instead, Nevada (and many other states) have reduced penalties and now will not even arrest somebody with less than 28 grams (14k times the lethal dose). China solved their drug problem. Ours is spinning out of c…

5,502 opium, 3,946 fentanyl deaths in California for 2020, which is the most recent this dashboard presents: https://skylab.cdph.ca.gov/ODdash

For comparison: There were 3,449 gun related deaths reported in the same year: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...

* edited to clarify that gun deaths were from all cause, not just homicide

Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#86

Post by websg-x »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #84
inkyoto wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did that letter suggest the British were seen as equals? No. Chinese emperors saw every other state outside the Celestial Empire as a tributary state and expected a full submission to the Chinese emperor, hence the language. > The phrase "barbarian" is used 16 times in the text «Barbarian» (蠻夷) was a term to refer to anyone else other than a direct subject of the Chinese Empire. Only the Chinese people were conside…

Thanks for this breakdown. Do you have confirmation that 蠻夷 was what was used in the original text?

No, 夷人(foreigner)，was used.

Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#87

Post by LAC-Tech »

websg-x wrote: post #86
LAC-Tech wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this breakdown. Do you have confirmation that 蠻夷 was what was used in the original text?

No, 夷人(foreigner)，was used.

Source? It's probably classical chinese and I barely read any mandarin, but still curious :)

Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#88

Post by websg-x »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #87
websg-x wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, 夷人(foreigner)，was used.

Source? It's probably classical chinese and I barely read any mandarin, but still curious :)

"擬諭英吉利國王檄", https://kknews.cc/zh-tw/history/ybvzq2k.html has original and pretty good "白話文" translation.

Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#89

Post by inkyoto »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #84
inkyoto wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did that letter suggest the British were seen as equals? No. Chinese emperors saw every other state outside the Celestial Empire as a tributary state and expected a full submission to the Chinese emperor, hence the language. > The phrase "barbarian" is used 16 times in the text «Barbarian» (蠻夷) was a term to refer to anyone else other than a direct subject of the Chinese Empire. Only the Chinese people were conside…

Thanks for this breakdown. Do you have confirmation that 蠻夷 was what was used in the original text?

I had not consulted the original text prior to replying, so I used a collective 蠻夷 as a guess. 蠻 and 夷 both translate as barbarian, an adjective and a noun (so to speak). 夷 is the character used in Archaic (Classical) Chinese that was used to write the letter (Archaic Chinese, which had a very different grammar and vocabulary was used for all written communication in China, Korea, Japan and Viet Nam until the early 20th century) to refer to barbarians whereas 蠻 has been used more recently.

In the text being referenced further down the thread the following words are used:

  眾夷 – crowd(s) of barbarians
  夷人 – barbarian(s), literally «barbarian person(s)»
  夷船 – barbarian ships
  外夷 – foreign barbarians
  夷 – barbarian(s)
  奸夷 – wicked / evil barbarians
  國夷 – barbarian countries/states, literally «country/-ies of barbarians».
蠻 is not found anywhere due to not being used in Classical Chinese.

Curiously, in Viet Nam, being written as 越南, the 越 refers to Baiyue or «one hundred yue (tribes)» (百越 that had formed an ancient Yue Kingdom and were considered barbarians at the time). And therefore 越 has had pretty strong barbaric connotations in the historical context for a long time. The actual name of the Viet Nam is, in fact, Nam Viet 南越, but words had to be swapped around at the behest of the Jiaqing Emperor of Qing to conform with the Classical Chinese grammar.

Re: Lin Zexu's Letter to Queen Victoria (1839)

#90

Post by anonymousiam »

itbeho wrote: post #85
anonymousiam wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did not get much media coverage, but when Donald Trump was giving a speech in Las Vegas last week, he suggested that stricter laws for Fentanyl trafficking should be enacted, including capital punishment. Instead, Nevada (and many other states) have reduced penalties and now will not even arrest somebody with less than 28 grams (14k times the lethal dose). China solved their drug problem. Ours is spinning out of c…

5,502 opium, 3,946 fentanyl deaths in California for 2020, which is the most recent this dashboard presents: https://skylab.cdph.ca.gov/ODdash For comparison: There were 3,449 gun related deaths reported in the same year: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/... * edited to clarify that gun deaths were from all cause, not just homicide

Nearly 100k deaths from opioids in 2020 (the most recent year with full data). https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/deaths/index.html

Fentanyl is an opioid, albeit a synthetic one. The CDC numbers don't break down the percentages of which drug killed the most people. The California site that you cited does, but the 5,502 number you cite is "Deaths Related to Any Opioid Overdose", which includes Fentanyl. So according to the link you cited, nearly 72% of all opioid deaths (in California) were caused by Fentanyl. The California firearm death count you cite is still lower than California's Fentanyl death rate for the same period. Extrapolating for the whole country using California's Fentanyl/Opioid ratio yields an approximate US Fentanyl death count of 65,838 for 2020.

https://www.dea.gov/factsheets/fentanyl

"Rates of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone, which includes fentanyl and fentanyl analogs, increased over 56% from 2019 to 2020. The number of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids in 2020 was more than 18 times the number in 2013. More than 56,000 people died from overdoses involving synthetic opioids in 2020. The latest provisional drug overdose death counts through June 2021 suggest an acceleration of overdose deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic."

https://www.cdc.gov/opioids/basics/fentanyl.html

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