A Wisdom Archive on Concubine

The term concubine generally signifies relationships where the male is the dominant partner, socially and economically. In this model the male may also have one or more wives as well. Some historical Middle Eastern and East Asian rulers are examples of this pattern. A woman attached to a man solely for reproduction, and who cares for the resulting children without any romantic relationship, is also consided a concubine. The father in this ca ...

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Liu Bei - Early life. Born in the prefecture of Zhuo (涿, present day Zhuozhou, Hebei), Liu Bei was a descendant of Liu Sheng, one of the sons of Emperor Jing. However, after generations Liu Bei was no longer closely related to the ruling family of the Han Dynasty. He lost his father when he was still a child and, together with his mother, sold shoes and straw-woven mats for a living. At fourteen, Liu Bei was sent to study under Lu Zhi, a scholar and governor of Jiujiang. There he met and befriended Gongsun Zan, who was also a pupil of Lu Zhi and later bec ...

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The novel is conjectured to be semi-autobiographical, mirroring the fortunes of Cao Xueqin's own family. It was also intended to be a memorial to the women Cao knew in his youth: friends, relatives and servants. The novel is a detailed, episodic record of the lives of the extended Jia family, made up of two clans (the Ning-guo and Rong-guo houses), which occupies two large family compounds in the capital, Beijing. Originally extremely wealthy, with a female member was made an Imperial Concubine, the family eventually fell into disfavour with the Em ...

Read more here: » Dream of the Red Chamber: Encyclopedia II - Dream of the Red Chamber - Synopsis

The name of the main family, "賈" looks similar to the author's surname 曹 and has the same pronunciation in Mandarin as another Chinese character "假", which means fake or sham. Thus Cao Xueqin suggests that the novel's family is both a version of his own family, and simultaneously fictional - or a "dream"-version of his family. (Confusingly, Baoyu occasionally dreams of another Baoyu, whose surname is "Zhen", which puns on "real"). The novel is normally called Hong Lou Meng (紅樓夢) - literally "Red Mansion Dream". "Red Mansio ...

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Liu Bei is also worshipped as the patron of shoemakers in Chengdu, which is also known as the "City of Shoes" as more than 80 million pairs of shoes totaling 5 billion RMB in sales are manufactured there annually. It was said that in 1845, during the reign of the Daoguang Emperor, the shoemakers guild in Chengdu who called themselves disciples of Liu Bei sponsored the construction of the Sanyi Temple (三義廟) in Liu Bei's honor. After many times of relocation, the temple can be found in Wuhou District today. Since Mainland China loosened ...

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Liu Bei - Battle of Red Cliffs. Main articles: Battle of Red Cliffs, and [[]], and [[]], and [[]]

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The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a 14th century historical novel based on the events that occurred before and during the Three Kingdoms period. Written by Luo Guanzhong more than a millenium after the period said, the novel incorporated many popular folklore and opera scripts into the character of Liu Bei, portraying him as a compassionate and righteous leader who built his kingdom on the basis of Confucian values. This is in line with the historical background of the times during which the novel was written. Furthermore, the auth ...

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Dream of the Red Chamber - Early 80-chapter versions. Early hand-copied versions—all of which are 80 chapters and incomplete—have comments written on them by members of Cao's family, which give some clues as to how the novel was originally going to end. These are the textually most reliable versions, known amongst scholars as "Rouge versions" (脂本). Even amongst the some 12 independent manuscripts, small differences in wording, rearrangements and poss ...

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There is often a debate between Egyptologists and Afrocentric historians as to what race Cleopatra belonged to. Egyptologists say that Cleopatra was descended from the Ptolemaic dynasty, a Macedonian family, whose patriach Ptolemy I Soter was once a general for Alexander the Great. Ptolemy I was the son of Arsinoe of Macedonia by either her husband Lagus, a Macedonian nobleman, or her lover Philip II of Macedon. Egyptologists say the Ptolemaic family tree indicates that there was a great deal of interbreeding in the family, and that b ...

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The type and functions of marriage vary from culture to culture. Marriage - Western world. In the Americas and Europe, in the 21st century, legally sanctioned marriages are monogamous (although some pockets of society still sanction polygamy socially, if not legally) and divorce is relatively simple and socially sanctioned. In the West, the prevailing view toward marriage today is that it is based on a legal covenant recognising emotional attachment between the partners and entered into voluntarily. ...

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