Yet almost everything came from China. Faced with its inertia and its heavy traditions, China is going to regress and lose its technological advances. By the 18th century, western nations, which the Chinese described as barbaric, were arriving in this vast country; they found a closed-mindedness. The English refused to honor the emperor by dishonoring themselves.
Alain Peyrefitte, through a historical document written as a novel, takes us into the logbook of a British embassy, its stay in China, and the impossibility of reconciling two opposing conceptions of the state. Then it will be the opium war and later the concessions.
A magnificent book where we learn Chinese with young Thomas. The characters of this novel make us experience the commercial attempts of the English facing a country paralyzed before its emperor. The Chinese, monitored by the Mandarins, are forced to pay homage to a mere piece of cloth because it is yellow and symbolizes the emperor. It is a kind of exacerbated nationalism.
The immobile Empire, China will collapse by refusing to evolve in the 19th century, invaded, subjugated, it will be reborn with the long march, then awaken later, which is no longer the subject of this book.
It must be read to better understand this philosophy where religion and nationalism are intertwined.
Alain Peyrefitte offers us a beautiful journey through time, this end of the 18th century when France was drowning in the rivers of blood from the revolution and wars that it often provoked. China, during this time, was dozing in this immobility which would turn out to be fatal.
Thierry Jan
