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Or chinese for beginners.
‘The more you learn the more you realize you don’t know’… is a cliché.. though at times the bitter truth.. The more I learn about china the more I realize how it is very different to where I come from..
I was born on a certain australian ex-goldfield and grew up there. They had been as rich fields as you get, attracting (mostly) golddiggers and spivs from all over the globe in the 19th century.
Many came from china. There is a forgotten cemetery with hundreds of overgrown chinese graves in that town . exquisitely cut granite headstones like posts with finely carved characters now at weird angles.. some broken.. some fallen right over. There was a kind of redbrick structure like a large postbox that rumour had it was used to sacrifice a pig to the ancestors.. I don’t know what it was for. I went there a few times as a kid coz the remains of a great-grandfather of mine were also interred there. (in the catholic section).
By the time I arrived on the planet the gold had gone and so had the chinese. There was maybe one or two families of chinese descent in the region.. government policy officially known as ‘the white Australia policy’ didn’t allow the women to come. So the chinese diggers went back to hong kong ( a british colony at the time) or perished on the foreign soil they mined. There had been a china-town ghetto but it had basically vanished. Or was way underground.
It was a gold town that had burnt out leaving behind little but its great wall of bigotry . I look at it as a microcosm and a shithole from which the lotus doth grow.. hehehe.
I left it behind and as an undergrad in the big city, shared house with chinese (prc) students. I began to learn a few words of kitchen mandarin. (1980) we got along very well.. J
One of the strangest stories I have ever heard about the chinese is that they are descended from people from one of the islands of atlantis who, after their island sank, settled around one of the rivers in the peoples republic of today.. around an hui province. This is a myth* about the origional chinese. long long 龍龍 ago. frankly, i dont think the fundamentals have changed much since then.. There have been poetic points of culmination and low points like the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s which basically outlawed traditional Chinese culture. It is a bitter memory for many I have spoken with.
(I really feel I have to watch my words at this point. Here)
by the start of last century they had fallen to such a low point that the revolution of mao zedong was the revolution that they had to have.
The point about the descent from Atlantis is that the Chinese don’t owe anything to anyone in terms of fundamentals. They have their own. They have come to expression in people like lao zi and Confucius and in the lines on the art of the tang dynasty... the ancestors resonate very deeply with the teaching of the Buddha ….the buddha is said to have learned from lao zi himself a mandarin and sage who disappeared off the radar riding on the back of a yack some time in the first millennium at the age of 300 and something. Hehehe. China has its own sense of direction. Its own language, philosophy, literature, cuisine, dynamic, law, economy, the works..
The Qin dynasty ( whose final days are depicted so colorfully in the movie 'the last emperor ') wasn’t chinese.. they were Manchu and ran down a lot of what had been built up from earliest times.. that was really when the rot set in.. They way outstayed their welcome. Best not to confuse them with the chinese who tried to be rid of them on more than one occasion. (boxers)
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han chinese is a culture independent of the Tibetan and the Indian both also ancient. .. .. maybe they came from some other islands. You would have to ask the ghosts of time.
My feeling is that one either admires chinese civilization or one is ignorant of it.
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* when I say myth I mean another dimension of reality. The myth from one angle is the absolute truth which the exemplars on the planet imitate.. the exemplars are the fakes.. just trying to approximate the ideal. Maybe you aren’t interested in neoplationsm.. I don’t know what you are doing here then.
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