Here's something which just barely possibly happened: a Chinese emperor decided to order the tides around. Well, up and down; but maybe around too; you know these Chinese emperors. This one issued his commands. And to make sure that the tides complied, he sent a trusted subordinate to the sea to check. It's several days' journey from Peking, but that doesn't matter. Now the Chinese are clever and intelligent, and the ones detailed to transport this guy figured out the rhythms of tides and they also contrived, by slightly slowing the passage here or imperceptibly hastening it there, to ensure that when the guy arrived, the water was exactly where the emperor told it to be.

Some years ago I bought and listened to the Great Courses lectures on Chinese history, the whole darn thing, and it did not have a story like this one. Or very many stories at all. I am going to assume that there aren't that many: China is dull. How, then, to process such a voluminous and drab record?

My way has been just to light on a few facts, ones which only incidentally depend on China itself. Rereading the lecture notes now rather than slogging through the audio component again, I am at last grasping the real significance of Marco Polo's venture. He could take the trip he did when he did because the Mongols' conquests, crazed as they were, opened a safe corridor clear across Asia. I am also pleased to be reminded of China's very brief phase of global naval exploration, the one where it got to Mozambique, then just turned around. If this was a reaction rather than a plan, I think it perfectly reasonable. And I am struck by how much New World silver – which arrived via the Philippines – mattered to China. I happen to care slightly more about the effect on Spain. Neither country really advanced as a result of this trade. One went back to being poor, one went on to being Communist.

In any case, these isolated points on a timeline I find more stimulating than a list of dynasties. Tang, then Song; Han way back there; Manchu way over here; Yuan and then Ming somewhere in the middle. I am not convinced that such a list matters.

But another way, and maybe the better way, to process history is to develop, as I did at the beginning, an effective parody of it. I bet if a Chinaman read my first paragraph, he'd grin. Because it came close to truth, some truth of some sort. That alone might say quite a lot about the country, or the culture. (And if he thought it stupid or disrespectful, that too would be informative.)

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Not exactly the same problem: I nurse my theory that nobody has actually read Marcel Proust, and so no one can disprove that in In Search of Lost Time he correctly predicted the winners of the first fifty Super Bowls. You could read the whole thing (I stopped at volume 1, Swann's Way) but I doubt you ever will, and while I am sure C.K. Scott Moncrieff was an honest and honorable fellow, I still suspect he skated over some passages as he produced his "translation." Hey, who wouldn't? I am, it will be observed, generously imagining Proust actually wrote an interesting paragraph, one that even fit in a single page, every year or so whether he needed to or not. As I am imagining China did the national equivalent every dynasty or so.

Are there French parodies of Proust? Do French people like to joke that these doorstops contain fabulous riches? The humor depending on nobody's knowing where exactly these are?

(11/1/20)