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When the British arrived at the emperor's summer residence, they were lavishly entertained and spent days touring its beautiful parks and temples. Macartney(马戛尔尼), a good Englishman and loyal to his king, refused to kowtow to the emperor and provoked a huge scandal at the Chinese court. In their final meeting, the British were asked to bow to a scroll from the emperor. And when they opened it, its message was pointed.
"We possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious and have no use for your country's manufactures. Oh, King of England, tremblingly obey and show no negligence." This is a story of pride. Two empires each convinced they were the masters of the universe. One of the British delegates said "In short, we entered Beijing like paupers. We remained in it like prisoners and we quitted it like vagrants."
Humiliated, the British plotted their revenge, knowing full well from all the military intelligence they had gathered that when it came to war, the Chinese were centuries behind the Western world. The Great Wall was obsolete.
A century of Chinese humiliation, civil war, foreign invasions and chaos was to follow. In the 20th century during the turmoil of Mao's Cultural Revolution, wonderful stretches of the ancient wall were destroyed.
Today the wall was protected and is an icon for China used in advertisements from cough drops to banking. But preserving and conserving an ancient monument, some 35,000 miles long, is a nightmare for the Chinese. In an era when almost everything on the planet has been mapped, the wall remains so complicated and so vast that not one single accurate map of it exists. All of this is a constant worry to the man who knows the wall better than anyone else. Now in his 60s, Chen Daling spends every day photographing and looking for lost sections of his beloved wall. He worries that no young Chinese scholar is ready to take his place. He worries that the wall would be spoiled by commercial exploitation, and he worries that the more remote parts of the wall would be destroyed simply because no one knows their importance.
As Chen walks across China, he is also walking back in time--as far back as the Emperor Qin and the millions of Chinese who died building the wall. He is afraid they would be forgotten as Chen puts it "they died building the greatest construction ever built by man."
scandal: an action or event regarded as morally or legally wrong and causing general public outrage
bow: prostrate one self
pauper: beggar
cough drop: sweet hard candy containing medication to help stop coughing
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