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昨天我去大学。现在我是研究生。我有我的借书证和我学生证。然后我去大学的图书馆。我很高兴因为大学的图书馆有很多美书，英文书和中文书。我借了两本书。
今天我又去大学我约我的教授.我有两门历史课和一门文课。我很高兴因为我能修二年级中文课。
教授jiao4shou4professor
take courses: 修课
今天我又去大学我约我的教授.我有两门历史课和一门文课。我很高兴因为我能修二年级中文课。
教授jiao4shou4professor
take courses: 修课
So yesterday after getting my library card I went and spent an hour or so in the SOAS library, for a quick look round, drooling over so many books they had there. I found 200 year old Buddhist sutra's in Chinese just sitting on the shelves! (I later found out today they just sacked their Chinese librarian which is a huge shame and so I went to my first student protest but that's another story.) I almost shed tears seeing some of the books I'd been wanting to read for so long just sitting there on the shelves available for checkout. Oh it made me so happy to be a graduate student.
I ended up checking out two books on Empress Wu. I had not been able to find a single book about her until yesterday despite years of searching. So I took them both home and last night read The Empress Wu by C.P. Fitzgerald. The book was written in the mid 50's and has a rather old fashioned, but nice approach. The book was originally intended for a general audience but goes into a lot of specifics about the reign of Empress Wu and her husband and so had so many of the details I've been missing.
It started with an introduction to Tang court life, and a little background on the positions and how the court was run. The book gave a strict chronological approach to everything that happened from the time Wu entered the royal court till shortly after her death in 703. The book did an excellent job of explaining the politics of the time, who everyone was, what their positions were and why they took the stances they did. There was also a chapter devoted to the military campaign against Korea and why that was significant. Half the book covered Wu's life before she came to power and the other half looked at her life after wards.
Fitzgerald seemed to have a fairly sympathetic reading of Empress Wu. He dismissed a lot of the accusations against her, in particular in regards to murder and infanticide as probably being hearsay and written by biased men. When discussing the terrors of her inquisitional style secret police he tended to put the blame for their torturous excesses on the men in charge, rather than Wu at the top. He also repeatedly mentioned how she was an affective ruler as there were no revolutions against her by the people, they seemed content with her reign, and how when there were rebellions by the elite they were short and quickly put down and Wu always maintained support from those around her until just before her death.
The one thing I wish that he had focused on more was the role that religion played in her reign. He touched briefly on the things she had built and the prophecy's that were circulated about her but did no real analysis on what any of this meant or how it helped. Fitzgerald seemed unfortunately at times to be more interested in the men around her than in what Wu herself was doing. A large part of this I'm sure is due to the problem with the surviving texts that he had to work from.
Despite being a more general book and devouring it in an evening I did enjoy it a great deal. It made me so happy to finally find a whole book about Empress Wu after having searched for so long, (actually two but I've not quite finished the secound one yet).
I ended up checking out two books on Empress Wu. I had not been able to find a single book about her until yesterday despite years of searching. So I took them both home and last night read The Empress Wu by C.P. Fitzgerald. The book was written in the mid 50's and has a rather old fashioned, but nice approach. The book was originally intended for a general audience but goes into a lot of specifics about the reign of Empress Wu and her husband and so had so many of the details I've been missing.
It started with an introduction to Tang court life, and a little background on the positions and how the court was run. The book gave a strict chronological approach to everything that happened from the time Wu entered the royal court till shortly after her death in 703. The book did an excellent job of explaining the politics of the time, who everyone was, what their positions were and why they took the stances they did. There was also a chapter devoted to the military campaign against Korea and why that was significant. Half the book covered Wu's life before she came to power and the other half looked at her life after wards.
Fitzgerald seemed to have a fairly sympathetic reading of Empress Wu. He dismissed a lot of the accusations against her, in particular in regards to murder and infanticide as probably being hearsay and written by biased men. When discussing the terrors of her inquisitional style secret police he tended to put the blame for their torturous excesses on the men in charge, rather than Wu at the top. He also repeatedly mentioned how she was an affective ruler as there were no revolutions against her by the people, they seemed content with her reign, and how when there were rebellions by the elite they were short and quickly put down and Wu always maintained support from those around her until just before her death.
The one thing I wish that he had focused on more was the role that religion played in her reign. He touched briefly on the things she had built and the prophecy's that were circulated about her but did no real analysis on what any of this meant or how it helped. Fitzgerald seemed unfortunately at times to be more interested in the men around her than in what Wu herself was doing. A large part of this I'm sure is due to the problem with the surviving texts that he had to work from.
Despite being a more general book and devouring it in an evening I did enjoy it a great deal. It made me so happy to finally find a whole book about Empress Wu after having searched for so long, (actually two but I've not quite finished the secound one yet).
.