Emperor of China: Self Portrait of Kʻang Hsi

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The Emperor K'ang-hsi, who speaks through these pages, was one of the greatest rulers in all of China's three-thousand year history, a man easily as powerful and significant as his two contemporaries Peter the Great and Louis XIV. His long reign spanned more than sixty years, from 1661 to 1722, and when he died he left a flourishing and stable kingdom more vast than any other on earth. Yet the man himself has remained unknown: like all the emperors of China, K'ang-hsi lived out his days sealed behind screens of protocol - remote, exalted, his true nature an enigma . . . Emperor of China is the inspired outgrowth of Spence's close reading of the rich stores of documents that K'ang-hsi left behind him: letters, edicts, commands, pardons, poems. Drawing from this mass only those piercingly alive fragments that bear the unmistakable stamp of K'ang-hsi's character and personality, Spence weaves them together into a brooding narrative that reads almost like a novel. -- Book jacket.

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Ruling 25
Notes 177
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