Now let's get into its ending. A very, very carefully choreographed ending, if you like. If you read the translation, you'll find that basically army was slaughtered, and only 800 soldiers left. And eventually they will push into a stronghold onto a little hill and one by one his solders die in front of him. Finally said, it's not my fault. It is my destiny, it is heaven to him. So [INAUDIBLE] moment, a historian would be surprised a modern historian would be surprised that suddenly, the narrative shifts to romance. Suddenly, there's a woman who appears. There was no premonition as to who this woman is. She is simply introduced as Lady, who apparently is 's paramour, if not concubine. You may recall that later on, there's a famous Chinese movie called Farewell, My Concubine. It's the folk version, the big opera version of Xiaoyu's final ending, to sort of a double suicide with his lady, Douzi. So both sang songs. And song is known throughout China history as one of the most famous songs ever sung by a hero. And there he describes himself, again, in hero fashion. Let us just say that he first disquiet his own strengths, that he has the sense, he has the power to lift up mountains. Hyperbole if you like but that's what he tries to get here. He's a kind of giant figure so to speak. And then he has a kind of prowess, a kind of presence that can lord over the empire China, Chinese territory. Or his age, but of course, with all those potentials he still fails. Why? Because according to him, heaven is not on his way. So he said, he keeps repeating that somehow, I did not fail, heaven failed. And this repetition later on it becomes a bone of contention. At very end makes his final verdict. And that verdict's very interesting. Following Confucius, he basically sort of gives his summary about life. There are three points he made, basically. One is that he really is a heroic figure, he had tremendous power, and all that. He rises very fast. And the second point is that for a brief period, about five to six years, he is the one who gives orders. Who lords over all over China. So in that sense, he unifies China to a small extent, and that is unprecedented, because China, by that period was already undergoing 500 or 600 years of chaos. So all of a sudden you have the hero who basically sits on a four or five years or so. And thirdly, he falls deeply, for he is Chinese if you like. How dare he say that he does not fail and heaven fails him. How does he challenge heaven? Here, of course, the Chinese, sorta, philosophical region depart from the Greeks. Heaven is most mysterious and sort of predominant. In other words, there are no deities, sort of, each fighting for different heroes, as in from the great Odyssey. In the Odyssey or the Iliad, yeah. You know Homeric epics. Rather there's this one central mysterious force whose ways are unknown. So one can only come to some kind of understanding or some kind of insinuation of that heavenly way but one simply cannot defy it. One simply cannot say, it's not my fault, it's heaven's fault. How can you fault heaven? So, my question is that, why would the grand historian, sort of raise these three points, and praise is showing for the second point that was for a brief period he was the unifier. And only at the end he says he failed. So in other words, he is trying to reveal a kind of basic fault, a basic defect, of character. Namely his violation of perhaps the first principal of the grandest writing, namely, to know the boundary between Heaven and earth, between Heaven and the human realm. You should not trespass that boundary. You should not aspire to be God. Yeah, you should know your human dimension. And follow the ways of Heaven. So this is sort of my interpretation of the whole text. I basically follow Professor argument that there are a lot of ambiguities. And also, follow his view that if you look closely at the narrative, is quite sympathetic to. Probably because, in own view, he was also a failed hero because he was castrated. So the only thing that can make him so his name, immortal, would be the completion of his book. And he did. And he says very clearly in the preface that one copy will be given to the Imperial library, another copy should be hidden somewhere in the mountains. So the posterity will be able to look at it. So this whole notion about [FOREIGN] becomes a cliche in Chinese history. The most intellectuals, philosophy intellectuals and scholars, will leave their, sort of, biographies or autobiographies, their own true confessions. In a text hidden somewhere so that his quoif can be justified. Does the same thing. Now, before I end my lecture, since we have compiled a lot of audio visual materials, so let me try to introduce some of the sort of later Chinese adaptations of the legend. Lives on. Although, in real life, he lived until age 31. But, his legend lives on down to the present day. In fact, last week I just watched a new movie made in China about. So there are [COUGH] continuing works found in popular media that rehash, the rewrite the legend. But perhaps the most famous popular text that basically quotes freely from the legend is the romance is rekindled. A novel written in the sixteenth century of the Ming Dynasty, but it depicts really another period of chaos after the Hi Yun Dynasty to show what is rekindled. If you have read that novel, you can find that some of the heroes are parallels, or latter-day sort of alter egos of the Shaolin hero. And also the and some of the other figures. In two chapters specifically, the banquet was referred to. So you can be sure that later-day Chinese novelists and historians very much aware of the legend. So he can be worked and reworked with quotations and quotations within quotations. So as to perpetuate this legend. And yet, in contrast, the Ming period was a period of increasing Confucian influence, which allows very little room for the military hero that exemplifies. Find a single like military hero who his six feet tall who can lift a cauldron, who kills thousands of people in one stroke. None, in my view. What heroes you find in the later dynasties are basically civilized heroes. For instance, who puts loyalty above everything else. Not power. And he, of course, even for his own loyalty, is defeated by a bad guy, by a villain, a villain minister. Or the young family of warriors, both men and women. Again, they fight very valiantly, but again, for loyalty to the court. So loyalty becomes the key issue as opposed to what exemplifies and that word I would like to sort of use in my own way that word is the Chinese word E. What I mean by the Chinese word E, the general English translation is righteousness. But that's not saying much. In fact in many ways, the meaning has been Confucionized. Also mentions Eve for instance. But in usage as I interpret it, he refers to a earlier warriors code. It is a code of living by the rules of excellence. Chinese style. And what is that Chinese Arete? Also a full life. Also a sense of face, one's external behavior. These are be, author like minded warriors. So for instance, in the famous Banque Chi, Basically, Shoin affirms, himself, as the leading hero in this cluster of arrangements. Yet, one has the feeling that is he sums up the Homeric context, the meaning of honor and valor It is a very loaded term. I think he's very little understood, even by his peers. Suma Chen, of course, tries to insinuate that. And hence, that old tradition, the warriors e somehow is lost. It's sort of a matched up into a general meaning of moral behavior which would be other human beings. So I think, in this case, our tragic hero is very much alone. He is alone in his surroundings. He is alone in the historical context. And therefore his death, also alone, is very tragic. Another interesting sort of a modern sort of a by-play of the legend was that at the very end of the Manchu dynasty, the Chin dynasty, some scholars, Confucian scholars no less, begin to argue that what China needs in order to defend out British imperialism was, in fact, Shao Yung life hero. A military warrior rather than a civilian. Because civilians are weak. There bodies are frail. They cannot fight the gunships. They cannot fight the warships and the guns of the British soldiers. So just Confucius collar, by the name of Lin Shiu translated dozens of, from a second-rate, English Victorian popular novels. Especially for instance Ivan Hall by Sir Walter Scott which may be first rate. And he sort of justified his translation precisely by just arguing mainly that what's underneath is a kind of revival of the military evils. He wanted to fend off the enemy. Since China does not have it or the China tradition is lacking it, he will have to seek from abroad and therefore, he goes to translations. Interestingly, after his translation became popular, suddenly the [INAUDIBLE] writers and translators discovered their own version of a western hero whom they put into [INAUDIBLE] sort of garb. And that hero, you can guess it, is the famous French general Napoleon. If there's one hero in translation, that almost appeal to everybody's imagination in the [INAUDIBLE] it was Napoleon. And there were countless sort of stories and novels using Napoleon as a figure. And several stories in fact borrow precise words, descriptions, phrases from the. He ordered to fit Napoleon's image. Now Napoleon as you know is very short, something no more than five feet tall. But then of course, his major stand tall at seven feet, so not eight as in a Chinese feet, you know. So, the studied military arts. Became how Napoleon started. So a kind of replica of hero. So in a way lives on but in a western custom. Or the vice versa when Napoleon sort of lives on in a Chinese custom. So this is sort of, it's a very interesting, so the side line, if you like, of the legend. And finally I would try to perhaps introduce you to some of the recent popular media samples about a Shonu legend. Here is a very interesting to see that in China, in Hong Kong, the portraits are very different. Yet they share something in common. That is to say they no longer pay too much attention to the military value I'm showing you. But rather they pay more attention to the intrigue. Two defactors to the military campaigns to [INAUDIBLE] suspicions, the questions that surround the [INAUDIBLE] legend. You may say this is a kind of a post modern way of poking at the myth in order to show his contemporary relevance. But really it doesn't matter whether you like the movies or not. Suffice it to say that lives on. If not as a real person, but certainly in our imagination. Thank you.
