Rule By Two Key Figures

Ah, the U.S. had its daylight savings time.  They done fell back.  So, the 7:00AM weekly call I have for Thursday will now take place at 8:00AM.  An upgrade.  But the one for 9:30PM tomorrow night will not start till 10:30PM, which isn’t going to work.  Here in China there are no “savings” plans.  We just keep on getting darker till we don’t. 

Diving into Carlyle’s “History of the French Revolution.”  There’s a wonderful juxtaposition between when the young King Louis the XV nearly died and all the French nation prayed for his recovery to the time, decades later, when the same king was indeed at death’s door and no one wept a tear. I had to pull out my lap top to go and consider just who Fifteen actually was.  Everyone can remember Fourteen l'etat est moi.  And can flash ahead to Sixteen having his head removed with Marie Antoinette at the Guillotine.  But Louis XV who reigned for fifty-nine years, clearly did not leave the Kingdom in better hands than he found it.

Born in 1710 he came to the throne five years later and ruled until his died of small pox in 1774. His reign was only exceeded by that of his great granddad, the Sun King who ruled for seventy- two years.  Louis XIV reigns from 1643 to 1715.  Taken together it is a remarkable period of contiguity that matches almost exactly what happened in China at the same time. Kangxi’s reign begins 1661 and lasts until 1722.  He remains the longest ruling emperor only because his grandson Qianlong reigned from 1732 to 1796, stepped down “officially” as a sign of filial piety so that his reign would always be shorter than is grandfather. 

Both China and France then shared the “age of absolutism”, and shared long, uninterrupted periods of rule by two key figures.  The French Monarchy wouldn’t survive more than another fifteen years, beyond the death of Louis XV, where the Qing obviously continued for another hundred and ten years before they were finally toppled.  The end of Qianlong and his sublime confidence in dismissing the British emissary McCartney was surely the beginning of the end for the Qing.

I note that these webbings between one end of Eurasia and the other help to buttress a historical perspective, so that what’s happening in China is easily contextualized with the more familiar trajectory of Europe in the eighteenth century.   

Thursday, 11/08/19