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The Quest for Total Power
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14603 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1988 |
2,921 Words |
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Arthur Waldron
Arthur Waldron teaches history and East Asian studies at
Princeton University. In the early 1980s, he worked as a tour
leader and lecturer in China. |
THE CHINESE EMPEROR
Jean Lévi, translated from the French by Barbara Bray
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987
352 pp., $18.95
Chinese themes have been appearing in Western novels for centuries, but episodically, and in ways that say as much about Western concerns as they do about China itself. The Chinese Emperor, Jean Lévi's striking historical fantasy about the first unified Chinese empire established more than two thousand years ago, is no exception.
The action takes place in the empire of Ch'in, from which our own word China is derived. Ch'in started out as one of roughly half-a-dozen states that, in the first millennium B.C., held the territory that would later be China. Although they possessed a certain degree of cultural homogeneity and even recognized a single, rather shadowy monarch, these states were political rivals, and their princes contended for the role of hegemon (as the Chinese word pa is usually translated) of the "Middle Kingdoms" (chung-kuo, originally a plural).
Total transformation
The three remarkable figures who dominate Levi's book welded those "Middle Kingdoms" into a single centralized empire, the ancestor of every great Chinese state since, and also (even more than Greece and Rome for Westerners) the setting in which later generations have dealt, through imagination and by analogy, with the problems and issues of their own
... (1953 of 17275 Characters)
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