Historical Artefact

WW1 somehow lead me to all this.

[mispatchedgreens]

humbly, i present to you my collection of 'the radiant emperor' playlists:

1. i refer to you (my holy sovereign)

doomed by the narrative (but when you've written the narrative yourself); a general ouyang playlist

2. sunburst-black

alas, poor wang baoxiang!

3. misfortuned | 苦命

a playlist for the fic of the same name by hydrochaeris on ao3

[hanfugallery]

chinese hanfu by 夫诸Fzz

[hunxi-after-hours]

The Language of Chinese Dreams Is Science Fiction — And Sometimes They’re Nightmares

On the restless night of June 3, 1989, a young engineer visiting Beijing for a trade conference had a nightmare. He dreamt of a battalion of children fighting in a whiteout blizzard under the penet…

“When western audiences engage with artists and writers from authoritarian countries, it often becomes an expectation that “good” art is dissident art. We heap praise on creatives because their skills are directed toward criticizing the governments of their home countries. The exiled Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and the Russian punk rock band Pussy Riot are good examples of this. Liu Cixin is not, but that doesn’t mean we can rightly condemn him or his work for being insufficiently subversive. Instead, we can become more attuned to the many shades of gray in his worldview, because those shades speak volumes in their Chinese context.”

[levourdalak]

Nineteen Ways of Looking At Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem is Translated Eliot Weinberger & Octavio Paz, 1987

[fateology]

my try :}

[fwoopersongs]

鹿柴 - Deer Villa by 王维 (Wang Wei, 701 - 761)

空山不见人 kōng shān bù jiàn rén The mountain is empty, no one within sight,

但闻人语响 dàn wén rén yǔ xiǎng but heard - the echoes of conversation.

返景入深林 fǎn jǐng rù shēn lín Dusk’s reflected light enters the deep forest,

复照青苔上 fù zhào qīng tái shàng again, shining upon green moss.

………………………………………………………………………………………….

Remembering this from the poetry workshop last year, how could I not try? :D!!!!

Take note! The 柴 is read as zhài and not chái (which confused me a bit at first!), and do take the ‘villa’ meaning and not the ‘fencing’ one, because 鹿柴 was a villa on Wang Wei’s Wang Chuan valley estate at the foot of Zhongnan Mountain. 

This poem rings with silence and echoes and glints with reflected light. I love how in the emptiness (on a mountain), naturally, there would be echoes. And what better to create an ideal environment for glossy green moss than a deep forest? The slanting sunlight of dusk finding its way through the leaves of the canopy, and the green moss glowing - that he has seen many times.

[linaliee]

Kobayashi Eitaku

Body of a Courtesan in 9 stages of Decomposition, c. 1870.

[fl0rklore]

capybaras have been on argentine news lately because they’ve “invaded” a rich private neighborhood (built on the capybara’s natural habitat) and the memes are good

[prime-tiktoks]

[guerrillatech]

[hunxi-guilai]

Hello! You love quoting poetry, and I love it when you quote poetry, but for those of us who don't speak Mandarin, reading ancient Chinese poetry is complicated simply because finding good (or any) translations is, uh, difficult. I'd love to have my characters quote and refer to poems in my writing, but I've spent more time bent over a dictionary than actually appreciating the poems =_= Thus, a question: would you mind your poetry translations being used (with credits, of course)?

hi there! generally speaking, everything on this blog is fair game to quote and cite (and I of course appreciate shout-outs <3). I think my only reservations would be if you’re trying to cite me in like, an academic paper, at which point I really hope your paper is about fandom or translation in fandom, otherwise you’d probably want to find someone with a P.h.D. and maybe a few published titles under their belt

and don’t underestimate the resources for reading Chinese poetry online! this website is a phenomenal place to start, and once you click into each individual poem, they have versions by character, pinyin, machine translation, and human translation

like so

and I’ve recently discovered that De Gruyter has an alarming amount of free, academic-level translations of Chinese poetry, available to straight-up download as PDF. if you so desired, you could download all six volumes of Du Fu’s collected works (that’s over a thousand poems, y’all) complete with translations and annotations

[counterfetts]

“The First Battle Memorial was a commemorative monument in honor to the many clone troopers who died during the first battle of the Clone Wars on Geonosis. The monument was constructed on an enormous slab of Geonosian rock, and the wall was engraved with the designations of the fallen clones. It was located on the outside plaza of the Republic Center for Military Operations on Coruscant.” (x)

The Clone Wars 5.18 “The Jedi Who Knew Too Much”

[itssteffnow]

The Supreme Leader and his General

I drew this a week ago or so? Anyway it was a great coincidence, because at the same time some non Kylux person over on twitter proclaimed Kylux a dead ship, living on scraps and without any artists! Yay xD 

So I was happy to contribute new scraps to our dead ship 😆  (And yeah the tweet is a few days old now, but I still find it hilarious)

[kisamesopelagic]

MYTHOLOGY!

“One of the bodies we had thought to be unmoving rose from the mud and staggered towards us. Time has freed me of the burden of many memories, but the image of this lone figure stumbling through desolate No Man’s land is burnt into my mind. All of us stood to stare, touched by something we could not comprehend. We administered what aid we could to the surprisingly irate man, who stayed with us until he could get sorted out by our commanding officer. His presence had a profound impact, however temporary it was; as long as he was nearby, it felt as though no harm could befall us. That if a bullet felled us, we too may rise again. He carried himself with all the assurance and authority of a general even though he was of the same rank as us, encouraging those of us who faltered. When he parted that confidence lingered, but I felt as though I had lost a dear friend.

It appears strange to the man I am now that I never thought to ask his name or how he had come to be in this wretched place, but it held no significance at the time. We were all but fleeting faces in an anonymous sea of the walking dead.”

An excerpt from war memoires of a former British infantry soldier.

[lady-starkiller]

[girlbookwrm]

Maybe you think a ship is problematic, but ask yourself this: is it wedged sideways in the suez canal disrupting 12% of global maritime trade?

[kisamesopelagic]

MYTHOLOGY!

“He showed up seemingly out of nowhere in September, 1926. He must’ve walked the distance from another road, because we never heard an engine. When we asked who he was, he introduced himself as Comrade Ivan Vladimirovich and said he was sent by the government to teach the people about socialism. He stayed with us for about a month, telling us all about the places he’s been. From German villages in Ukraine, to the black sea, the mountains, the steppes, he’d been to Vladivostok and Siberia. My favorite stories were all about Moscow, though, a city I could hardly imagine at the time. He made everything sound so colorful! You could tell he was very happy with his work. He brought us books and instructed us that we need to build a community center. I was aged 14 then, and he entertained all my nagging questions about the outside world. He would put on a very serious expression and speak solemnly, but there was always a twinkle in his eye. Only sometimes in the evening when he stood with the adults did he seem a little lost, like something was troubling him deeply. For everything he seemed to know about the world, and yes he seemed to know almost everything!, he barely spoke of himself. My mother told me he had been in the war. I often wonder what became of this bright man and my heart breaks. One day he walked away in the morning, leaving the same way he had arrived.”

Entry of a diary found in a remote village.

[tiend]

Guido on Twitter

“In a bunker we obtained that was formally in use by NATO and the Dutch Military, they forgot to 'clean' one room. This room was hidden behind a moving wall and therefore forgotten when they decommissioned the bunker. In this room there was this equipment: 1/... #coldwar #NATO”

After the Empire falls, the New Republic guts its military. Sells off its assets. Demobs the storm troopers. Decommissions its bases, its capital ships.

Maybe you buy it. Maybe you like to urbex. Maybe it’s part of a truth and reconciliation project. Regardless, you discover that this wall is not a wall, but a door.

There’s tech in here so old you’ll need a forensic engineer to look at it, but the lights are still blinking green, green, green, and through the faceplates, you can tell that all the occupants of the cryo-stasis pods have the same face.

[notbecauseofvictories]

Kylo Ren has been the Resistance’s prisoner for two weeks and three days when the nameless soldier standing guard says, “I had a holo of you over my bed when I was younger.”

Kylo stares up at the ceiling, watching the Force-shield around his cell ripple blue. He wishes he had his mask back, the anonymity of it. The kindest thing Snoke had done for him was to bury Ben Organa behind a wall of black and banish his name from everyone’s mouths. (You’re free, Snoke had said, gentle and heavy as loss. I have set you free of him.)

That wasn’t me, Kylo Ren wants to tell the Resistance soldier, or maybe, You’re still pretty kriffing young. Instead, he shuts his eyes, breathes out. The metal bed is cold beneath him, and he’s tired, he can’t keep fighting for every inch. There’s no point to it anyway.

“Was it the one from the standardized education campaign?” he asks. “I hated that holo, my ears look like satellites.”

There’s a pause, then the soldier stammers: “Uh—no, it was from the Concordance Anniversary Ball. I cropped it from the holonews.”

The memory returns to him sluggishly—he had been sixteen, and furious that this was the reason his mother had sent for him; not to bring him home but trot him out at one of her functions, so that he could smile and smile and answer the same six questions about Uncle Luke’s training, pose for the holographer with his father’s hand on his shoulder. He’d fought with both of them on the way back, the last three-part screaming match of House Organa. The next morning he left Chandrila in stony silence, and Snoke had come for him soon after.

“I had a crush on you,” the soldier says, mostly sounding disappointed.

Kylo laughs, despite himself—it’s hardly the first time, but it’s been so many years and he’d forgotten how much he hates hearing that. Ben Organa, first son of the Republic, perfect post-war poster child, at least until he started fucking up where everyone could see. (He’d say he stopped being fit for public consumption, but the public had gone on consuming anyway, greedy for him to lose his temper in another interview, to destroy something new with the storm of Force roaring through his skull. He’d hated this most of all, though—people looking at him, writing their expectations and wants on his skin. There had been a hundred thousand boys and girls in the New Republic with his face on their bedroom walls, and they all felt the need to say so, when they met him. 

At least with the Force-shield, he can’t sense that nauseating sickle-hunger of desire. He can’t sense anything. It’s almost a relief.)

“I’m curious, what did they say, after the attack on the Academy?” Kylo asks, trying not to sound bitter and failing. “The General drew whispers of ‘Vader’ every time she raised her voice; an unforgivable sin like the death of children much have had them shouting. How did they explain…”

A compound full of corpses, one conspicuously absent, but Kylo can’t force the words out, choking on which pronouns to use for an event he had mostly watched through his own eyes, like a spectator to the carnage of his hands.

“Everyone knows that—Ben Organa went missing after the attack,” the soldier says, only stumbling a little on the name. “The General took a leave of absence from the Senate, to search with Captain Solo. With the previous kidnapping attempts, it was assumed……They even called you ‘The Lost Prince of Alderaan’, like that holodrama.

“Maybe you should have stayed stayed lost,” the soldier adds, after a moment.

Kylo wonders how much it had cost his mother to bury the truth. “I forgot about the kidnapping attempts,” he says quietly.

(Four, by the time he was old enough to send away to Luke’s. And two assassination attempts. He had forgotten.)

“You forgot?”

“My life has been pretty miserable, I can’t be expected to keep track of every awful thing that happened in it,” Kylo says, hating the lazily-amused tinge to his voice. He always reminds himself of Han Solo when he sounds like that. He can feel ‘kid’ fighting its way from behind his teeth.

“You brought most of that misery on yourself, Kylo Ren.”

“I know,” he says, because he had. It had been the second-kindest gift Snoke ever gave—not the promise that the suffering would go away (the suffering would never go away) but that it would be his. Properly his. He would be black and faceless and terrible and no one would look at him, but if they did, it would be for his own sake, not the Republic’s. Not his mother’s. Snoke had always been very honest about what he was offering, the terms he offered it on. Kylo just hadn’t ever sat down and thought them through to their logical conclusion.

Now Snoke is dead, so it doesn’t really matter.

“What happened to you?” the Resistance soldier asks. “I mean—fuck, you were such a cute kid, such a good kid. You were going to be a Jedi.”

Kylo Ren opens his eyes, watches the ripple of the Force-shield, like the shimmer of heat, like water. He says, finally, “That wasn’t me.”