Volume 21, Number 19 · November 28, 1974
Sitting on Top of the World
By Harold L. Kahn
Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K'ang-hsi
by Jonathan D. Spence
Knopf, 218 pp., $8.95
Remoteness is often a condition of status and an attitude cultivated by parties to inequality. Chinese peasants, for more than twenty centuries subjects not citizens of the realm, were being literal when they said, 'Heaven is high and the emperor far away.' Their world was circumscribed by the village pump and the market place; their vision was local, concerned with how to make ends meet, or, infrequently, millennial, concerned with how to meet the End. The emperor's world was circumscribed only by the universe; it was made palpable by architecture and geography (the imperial city and the great Asian frontier), made mysterious by ritual, ceremony, law, and orthodox morality. His vision was cosmopolitan and historical, embracing the known world, a familiar past, and a future that might pronounce him a sage or a tyrant but never promise him salvation.
Review, 3158 words
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