India and China

India Flag

I have not written in a very long time, because I have been busy with Spring Break and other school work. If you scroll down the lists of my blog posts, you will see one entitled: “India and England.”In that blog post, I wrote about one of the Indian Emperors and three bad decisions he made that would later lead to an English takeover of India. Aurangzeb, the emperor, let the English make trading posts and towns in India. He thought this would help India prosper because of European trade, but what it really did was let the English get a good hold on India before they tried to conquer it outright.

The country of India was having big troubles. As soon as Aurangzeb died, three of his sons claimed the throne. The oldest son killed his brothers in battle and crowned himself. Now Emperor Bahadur Shah I ruled. He tried to repair his father’s mistakes about the Hindus, ( see
"India and England,") but he died after only five years on the throne.

His son was not a good ruler. He didn’t care about ruling at all. Finally, two brothers, Husain Ali and Hasan Ali, had him assassinated. They put another king on the throne, but eventually killed him too, because he was suspicious of them. The next two kings that they crowned died after less than half a year on the throne because of health problems. Finally, the Ali brothers found a king who got rid of them instead of the other way around. But he didn’t pay attention to India’s welfare either. India was breaking into pieces because the emperors weren’t strong enough to keep it together. All the officials were claiming land and ruling it themselves.

At this point, Persia was ruled by a highway robber, named Nadir who wanted to prove that he was truly Persia’s rightful ruler. He wanted everybody to acknowledge this, so he sent a message to India asking that they would hail him as the king of Persia. But because India was in great disarray, no one bothered sending a message back. Nadir took this as a personal insult and declared war against India. He had many soldiers and easily raided the treasure of India. He burned cities and looted the Taj Mahal. This was a perfect time for England to invade, because India was weaker than ever. And it did.

The ruler of Bengal, one of the little parts of India, saw that the English were getting stronger. He offered the French land in India if they would help fight to keep the English from conquering India. The French agreed, and together, the two armies captured one of the English forts. They forced all their captives into a little dungeon with no food or water. Although the captives were released in the morning, the English in England were angered at this cruelty. They sent an army to punish India. Soon, English rule was established in Bengal. England kept claiming more and more land in India. Susan Wise Bauer calls this “the shopkeepers’ invasion.”



Books



While India was falling apart, China was prospering. The Forbidden Palace was the home of the Emperor Chi’en-lung. He wanted the whole world to know China’s greatest accomplishment: its books. Books of poems, books of philosophy, and books of history and stories were scattered all over China, and he wanted to bring them together.  Chi’en-lung ordered that all of China’s greatest books were to be written down on a list. Then, all the books were to be copied so that the library could have a full set. This was not an easy job. The Chinese had letters for different sounds and words, and it was extremely hard to master the art of Chinese Calligraphy. The set had 36,275 books in it. Then, Ch’en-lung ordered six other copies to be made. Finally, one copy was completed, ten years after the search actually began.

But Ch’enlunng wasn’t satisfied with just preserving the old and wonderful Chinese books, he wanted to destroy the bad ones that opposed or questioned his rule and the rule of his descendants. These two huge tasks would take many years to complete.