Inside the Asylum

Israeli robot battle snake. Talk about living in the future!

I sort of get a general impression of what they're going on about, but don't ask me to explain the details! Another gem from the wordsmiths at North Korean news, KCNA.

The DPRK will steadily advance along the path of independence chosen by itself and will win a final victory in the confrontation with the U.S. whether it has flanks or not and whether it receives international aid or not.

 I saw this story in Xinhua today. Does the dress kind of remind you of the Japanese kimono? (Follow the link for more images of a similar nature.) If it does, there's a good reason for it.

 A model presents a creation inspired from the court dress in ancient China's Tang Dynasty (618-907), during a show of the 2009 Qingdao Fashion Week in Qingdao, a coastal city in east China's Shandong Province, June 15, 2009

The Tang Dynasty is considered by pretty much all Chinese people to be one of the two great high points of Chinese civilization (along with the Han Dynasty (202BC-220AD)). One of the great features of the Tang age was its openness to the outside world. Indeed, the Tang can be categorized as only semi-Chinese in origin, since the aristocracy of the age was a mixed package of the descendants of numerous northern invaders (who poured in after the collapse of the Han) and their Chinese subjects. In any case, it was a great age for international trade and diplomacy, and in this age of openness, it was also the time when China arguably had the greatest influence on other countries. If you want to see the best preserved examples of Tang Dynasty architecture and clothing, they always say that you should go to Japan, because Japanese temples and Japanese traditional clothing are essentially copies of the fashions of the great Tang. Dynasties rose and fell in China, fashions changed, but Japan preserved this legacy of the Tang like a great floating time capsule off the coast of Asia. 

The Tang Dynasty represents one of two competing reactions to the world, and is part and parcel of a cultural debate that still rages in China. Should China be open to all things foreign, and will this contribute to a 3rd great age of Chinese civilization, with a flowering of culture and technology, and a dominating influence on neighboring countries? Should China embrace western culture, and through trade and exchange will this lead China to once again rise to the status of cultural exporter?

Or should China adopt the Ming Dynasty model (1368-1644), which after their earlier adventures with long range navigation under Zheng He (referred to in my earlier Space Race post), they essentially turned their back on the world. The epic rebuilding of the Great Wall is merely the greatest outward representation of this distinct difference in world view. It's actually this Great Wall that all the tourists go to see when they visit Beijing, not the wall built a couple of thousand years ago. China had been utterly subjugated by the Mongols (Yuan Dynasty, 1271-1368) and the Ming represented the reappearance of an independent China ruled by a Chinese dynasty. Invaders from the north remained the greatest threat throughout the dynasty, the Mongols and later the Manchus. China was focuses on resisting the foreign threat. It defined itself by what it was not, and what it had to resist. It is the alternate and powerful other side of the great debate. China has only just emerged from a nightmare period of subjugation at the hands of numerous foreign powers (from Britain and France in the Opium Wars, to Japan up until 1945). Will it adopt the Ming model of resistance of outside pollution, adopting what could be termed a defensive posture?

To be Tang, or to be Ming, that is the question.