Emperor of China

Knopf, 1974-05-12. Hardcover. Good/Good. Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. Hardcover, 218, viii. Stated First Edition. Good in good dust jacket. Red cloth covered boards with gold lettering on front and spine. Light bumping, scuffing and soiling to edges of covers. Binding tight. Light spotting and soiling to edges of text block. Pages lightly aged but otherwise unmarked with occasional light spotting and soiling. Dust jacket has several 1.5" or less nicks and tears, some of which have been neatly repaired on the back side with clear tape. Light overall scuffing, fading and soiling to jacket as well. Price clipped. Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. Black and white illustrations [From jacket flaps] 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. In this extraordinary book, at once a feat of scholarship and a literary achievement of unique beauty, the distinguished historian Jonathan Spence, of Yale, has caused K'ang-hsi to reveal himself - as no other Chinese ruler has ever done - in his own words. Bear-hunting on the steppes, leading armies, doling out punishments and rewards, trying to understand everything from Western clocks to the I Ching, siring 56 children by 30 consorts (and watching their heartbreaking intrigues), struggling with old age, K'ang-hsi emerges complex and engaging, a moving and human figure in whom we see, as if refracted in a strange prism, flashes of both Sun King and Lear, of poetry and gaiety, of an earthy practicality and curiosity as well as a large and tragic sense of power as burden. Emperor of China is the inspired outgrowth of Jonathan Spence's close reading of the rich store 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'angh-hsi's character and personality, Spence weaves them together into a brooding narrative that reads almost like a novel. Absolutely exotic, yet absolutely real, this venture into a mind remote from us in time and custom will be compared with Marguerite Yourcenar's classic fiction Memoirs of Hadrian.