Boyang

Zhong Guo Ren Shi Gang (literally “An Outline of Chinese History”) takes readers on a tour from 3000 BCE to the end of Boxer Rebellion in the early 20th Century. But this is not a mere outline, as the title claims. This is a comprehensive look at Chinese society throughout history, including the rise and fall of dynasties, kingdoms, philosophies, and trends. Boyang tracks the changes in China’s economic development, as well as its borders. He also pays attention to the social conditions of the people at large, and how they were affected by changes in government and philosophy. Boyang wrote the manuscript for Zhong Guo Ren Shi Gang when he was a political prisoner in Taiwan. First published in 1979, this two-volume work was perhaps the first Chinese chronology to express time using a Western format, using centuries and BCE/CE. Up until then, time had been expressed in terms of each emperor’s reign. For example the 20th year of emperor Dao Guang’s reign may not mean much to an average person who is not familiar with emperors and their reign names. This, however, was the year of the Opium War (1840), which eventually led to the Treaty of Nanking and China’s loss of Hong Kong to England. Reign names made it difficult to map China’s development to that of other countries. In this book, each chapter covers a century; at the end of the chapter, a brief chronology of major world events is presented. This gives readers a better opportunity to place Chinese history in its global context.

Maren McClure and Kyle Sterling are enemies in a cutthroat, fast-track industry. He's threatening the company she fought to build; she's endangering his empire. But their instant attraction will raise the stakes from risk...to explosive.

Boyang says that empresses held one of the most dangerous positions in Imperial China. In this three volume series, Boyang documents empresses who were killed because of their position of power. Boyang argues that most people today only consider the glory associated with being an empress, while failing to see that the Chinese court throughout all the dynasties was a place of power struggle, both amongst consorts and within the political arena. In this series, empress is loosely defined to include all the wives and consorts of Chinese kings and emperors. This underscores the polygamous lifestyles of the emperors. Boyang stresses that an emperor may have had as many as 40,000 consorts at his disposal. All these women were there to provide pleasure for one man. Numbers this extreme may have been rare, but Boyang emphasizes that even the most modest emperors in the Qing Dynasty kept at least 200-300 consorts at any given time. With so many women jostling for the emperor’s affection, and given the often uncontrollable political disputes that followed, withdrawing an empress’ or consort’s title was commonplace. The repudiation of the title often led to the execution not just of the woman in question, but of her entire clan as well. Huang Hou Zhi Si documents the deaths of these empresses and consorts from 2390 BCE to the beginning of the Three Kingdoms period in 220 CE.