遐迩一體
xiá ěr yī tǐ
"those near and far treated as a whole"
This one's pretty straightforward. 體 can mean body, as in modern Chinese 身體, or per Kroll, also limb or element, or substance or essential being. Thus "one body," or "a whole." I remain dubious about imperial claims to such uniformity of treatment, but better that some effort is made towards treating all subjects of the empire as equals rather than relegating conquered peoples to second-class status, or worse.
微臣
史大偉
Olá, amigos. Time for another round of links to good shit.
Para quem lê português, o jornalismo do novo fonte Setenta e Quatro merece atenção.
Anyone interested in getting a better look at the deeply weird, quite lovely, and insanely fucked-up state I call home should read the Texas Observer, the Texas Tribune, and the Texas Signal.
Speaking of Texas, Lina Hidalgo has been overseeing Harris County since 2018, and has been a model of professional competence and steely resolve the whole time. For some fucking reason (cough, corruption and cronyism, cough), she has a bunch of Democratic challengers in this year's primary, which is nuts. You'd think that getting behind a young, effective immigrant woman would be a no-brainer, but apparently local Democrats would rather throw their lot in with cop unions and the unspoken preferences of officials who profit from county contracts. Lina Hidalgo is the only Harris County Commissioner who doesn't take money from contractors. That alone would be a reason to vote for her if she hadn't, you know, gotten us through the pandemic and 2021 freeze better than most officials in similar positions. (And if you're voting for Lina Hidalgo, make sure to vote for Molly Cook while you're at it.)
My brother's former bandmate recently turned me on to Black Braid, a one-man Native American black metal outfit from the Adirondacks. Naturally, this led to further research into that particular field, and the results are promising. Mutilated Tyrant and Parábola are from the Navajo Nation, while Lionoka represents the Yaqui people (and, according to the Metal Archives, runs Grey Matter Productions). Each band has its own sound, ranging from fairly orthodox black metal to longer, more ritual-tinged work, and I'm glad to see the continued growth of black metal far beyond its mostly Scandinavian roots.
Catch y'all later.
DAS
臣伏戎羌
chén fú róng qiāng
"The western tribes were subjugated"
I made that remark about wars of pacification in my last post without reading this line, believe it or not. Here we have a reference to the seemingly endless conflict between the Han and, well, everyone north and west of them. 戎 Rong is a catch-all term for non-Han "barbarians" to the west, and 羌 Qiang, according to Kroll's dictionary, is an "ancient name for proto-Tibetan peoples who migrated south from the Kokonor region."
You might recognize 臣 from my sign-off in Chinese: 微臣, "your humble servant."
微臣
史大偉
愛育黎首
ài yù lí shǒu
"they loved and nurtured the black-haired ones"
The "black-haired ones" are obviously the Chinese people, but who exactly the "Chinese people" are is a much larger question. Usually, what's thought of as "Chinese" is the 漢 Han ethnic group, China's largest at over 90% of the population of the People's Republic; however, there are 55 other ethnic groups in China, and even among the Han, there are myriad languages (or 方言 'topolects', as they're sometimes known, since they're not exactly dialects) associated with different Han sub-groups around the country, groups that could be considered ethnic groups in their own right.
That level of complexity aside (and it could be made even more complex by considering north/south divisions, among other things), I mention this because in modern Chinese 黎 can refer to the Hlai people of Hainan island, who constitute a distinct ethnic group; it can also mean (as it does in classical Chinese) "multitude" or "numerous," which serves more or less the same purpose as "black-haired" does here.
Ultimately, whether 黎首 deals specifically with the Han, or with all of the ethnic groups that have been folded into China through a couple thousand years of imperial expansion and assimilation, what we're supposed to take away from this line is that they were all looked after by their slack-sleeved, beneficent rulers. Never mind that that almost undoubtedly involved some wars of pacification along the way.
微臣
史大偉
垂拱平章
chuí gǒng píng zhāng
"with hanging sleeves and clasped hands, everything in order"
Another compressed image, but once I learned what was 垂-ing, or hanging, it made sense. I used "sleeves" here, but anything related to clothing would work, since the image is that of rulers unperturbed enough that they need only sit back with their hands folded over their chest and things will run smoothly. This picture of effortlessly benevolent rulers—all of whom existed in the glorious past, of course—is a constant feature in Chinese history. The development of the civil service exams and the bureaucracy indicates to me that Chinese thinking on governance and leadership wasn't entirely mired in this kind of nostalgia, even as nods to the near-perfect rulers of the past remained a necessary gesture up until the end of the imperial system. It's not much different than, say, American fetishization of the Founding Fathers; cultures and the states that emerge from them love having a golden age to pine for, since it allows existing problems (or "problems") to be ignored, or the fault of modern degeneracy, or some other group. I find this sort of conservatism ridiculously idealistic at best and deeply pernicious at worst.
平章 is an interesting phrase. Kroll mentions that, when 平 is pronounced pian instead of ping, 平章 is a phrase that means to "differentiate and mark out the merits of officials, as sage-king Yao 堯 is reputed to have done," and that 平章事 (with 平 pronounced ping again) was a title used by a certain kind of official in the 尚書省 Bureau of State Affairs during the Tang dynasty.
