9 Spice trade

Reading, mapwork, then ...

Extracts from Giles Milton's White Gold, Nathaniel's Nutmeg.
The world's oldest clove tree
Vic Reeves' Barbary Pirates

8 Printing

Reading and mapwork, then printing!

Visit Milton Keynes Museum print shop.
Visit Frogmore Paper Mill; contains print area, bookbinding area, paper making demonstrations.
Images of printing presses at the International Printing Museum.
On our list of places to go.

7 Henry the Navigator

Readings and mapwork. Using a Portolan chart.

6 Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta

Readings and mapwork, then

Extracts from The Travels of Marco Polo
The Naxos Audio Guide, Great Explorers

5 Dark ages of mapmaking

Readings and mapwork
Medieval views of the world; T-O maps
Arabic mapmaking
The Crusades

4 Ptolemy

Readings, mapwork, making an astrolabe
Watching Ptolemy

3 Lines on the globe

Readings and mapwork, then learning about latitude

2 Strabo and Eratosthenes

Readings, mapwork, and using a protractor

1 Early maps

Readings, mapworks, making edible clay tablets

Visit British Museum/Fitzwilliam Museum

Making Polynesian maps

China's change through revolution

This week we'll read the concluding extracts of Wild Swans from Chapters 23 to the Epilogue, tracing the author's thoughts about how she and China have been shaped by the history of events, by the influence of Mao, the power of the Communist Party, and the Cultural Revolution.

The author was not alone in questioning the state of China after the Cultural Revolution. Watch the documentary on Youtube from 1:07 to 1:11.

To conclude, let's also watch this documentary from 1:22 to the end. Note the scene at the waxworks; it's a good example of how the leaders of a country take opportunities to tell a history. Contrast this with the personal perspective you've read in Wild Swans.

Has the reading of the book helped you develop your ideas about China's history while you've stayed in Hong Kong?

'Thought reform through labour'

By 1969, China had dismantled its education system. Family life and social interaction was subject to intervention and management by the state.

For children growing up in these conditions, denied play, denied a range of experience, and denied safe refuge at home, finding a balanced way of behaving became increasingly difficult. Many turned to gangs, or behaviours such as fighting and stealing.

This created an urban problem. Central government presumably feared this would develop into a civil unrest, or perhaps a challenge to themselves. What do you think? Was the power structure in Peking ultimately afraid of the population?

One solution was simply to send young teenagers out of the cities, and to rural locations. They were instructed 'to learn from the peasants'. For many youngsters this experience was probably bitter. We'll read about this in Chapter 22 of Wild Swans.

Think about other histories you know of: what have been the techniques used by governments to deal with a population?

In Chapters 20 and 21 of Wild Swans, we see the extent of the persecution against the author's parents. She writes of this experience in 1968,

'That night, as I lay in bed listening to the gunshots and the Rebels' loudspeakers blaring out bloodcurdling diatribes, I reached a turning point. I had always been told, and had believed, that I was living in a paradise on earth, socialist China, whereas the capitalist world was hell. Now I asked myself: If this is paradise, what then is hell?'

China has much changed and is different today. In the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping's reforms, and the introduction of Communism with Chinese characteristics has resulted in the development of international trade, economic liberalisation, and Mao now officially being 70% correct.

If you consider historical time in hundreds, or thousands of years, rather than in single years or decades, then could you say that Mao and the Cultural Revolution has played a minor part? But maybe he has changed China for hundreds of years to come? Will his impact now endure through the control of the Communist Party? Or will the economic interests of the east and the west become bigger than their political differences, and so make them look more alike in the future? What do you think? Can you imagine historical time spread over hundreds of years?

Chapter 19 of Wild Swans. The author's father is highly principled; he is still very loyal to the ideas which originally fashioned the Communist Party. He writes a letter to Chairman Mao.

Do you think this will change events at this point in China?

Although we tend to think society won't ever change, circumstances can develop very rapidly. A fluid situation can throw up people who seize opportunities, take advantage of change, and manage events in their favour. They shape what happens next, for good or bad.

Can you think of people you've studied in history who you would say shaped events?

We'll pause this week in our reading to give the visitor a chance not to be (metaphorically) beaten about the head by the Chinese Communist Party.

(Find out instead about Falun Gong. They're usually outside the Star Ferry terminal, TST.)

Note! I see the Shen Yun Performing Arts Group is in London, April 2012.

Shen Yun is supported by Falun Gong. Falun Gong is banned in China, but is active outside China, and has links to the US and Taiwan, which we know as old Kuomintang territory.

The role of Shen Yun is as the 'cultural wing' for Falun Gong; they act as cultural ambassadors for a pre-Communist China. They present the ideas of the imperial regime through art. (Is it possible to see the Communist Party as a 'blip' in Chinese history?)

Can you begin to see why political control of the arts becomes so important?!

Watch this video about Shen Yun from their website on Classical Chinese dance. It is 18 mins long. You will come away with an understanding how politics and the arts are linked.

Nothing is simple in history, is it? There are always more stories to be told, depending on which angle you stand to look.

In the period we are now reading about in Wild Swans, the writer's parents come under attack.

Yet they have been Communist Party supporters who have worked diligently to change China. How could it happen, that they now come under attack? What events took place to allow it?

We'll watch the Youtube documentary from 59:00 to 1:05. Listen for these events:

• A change in local powers; the old hierarchy gives way to the hard-line Revolutionary Committees.
• The rise of Mao's wife.
• The fall of Liu Shaoqi, the potentially alternative leader to Mao who had previously criticised the Great Leap Forward.

How does an idea spread?

This week, as we continue to read what happens to the family in Wild Swans, we'll watch the Youtube documentary from just before 55:00 to 59:00.

How do ideas become taken up quickly in society, and then spread to large numbers of people? How does society 'agree' to a common set of ideas? Once an idea is taken up by large numbers of people, how do those ideas become reproduced for children in the next generation? If people wanted ideas to change direction or take on new meanings, how could they impose that?

There are no final answers to these types of questions, but look around you at the society and the groups of people we know, and let's see if we can come up with some responses.

National politics affects the family

Watch a few minutes from the documentary footage on Youtube, from 44:00 to 48:00.

Who should exert control over what happens inside the family home? Anyone? No-one? You? Parents? The state? The laws of a country?

Remember how mama's hair turned grey with Mr Balls and Mr Badman? I had visions of sanctioned council troops given freedom to rifle through my knicker drawer. But still not quite so horrendous as the trials for the family in our reading this week from Wild Swans, Chapters 17 & 18.

Politics at a national level affects what happens round the kitchen table. Ladies, it is your responsibility as a member of the family and the wider society to engage with this decision-making process.

No pressure. Now should Michael Gove stay or go and what do you want for breakfast?

The Cultural Revolution touched us all

We'll read about the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards in Wild Swans Chapters 15 and 16. Undoubtedly this is the period in China's history that most people know about in the West.

Read what Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education in the UK, wrote after visiting China in 2010:

'It's become fashionable over the Christmas holidays to refer to the Coalition as a Maoist enterprise. Not so much because the Government is inhabiting the wilder shores of the Left but because of the relentless pace of modernisation being pursued across government.

While the Opposition has nothing to say on any policy, the Government has been responding to the economic and social crises we face with big and comprehensive programmes.

And nowhere has that been more needed than in education, where I am happy to confess I’d like us to implement a cultural revolution just like the one they’ve had in China.' (28.12.10)

Your thoughts, ideas, and observations needed.

The cult of Mao begins

Chapter 14 of Wild Swans begins with the line, ''Chairman Mao,' as we always called him, began to impinge directly on my life in 1964'.

Check out Mao's Wiki profile.

Watch this documentary from 30:00 through to 35:00. This covers The Great Leap Forward ('it looks like madness but at the time it felt normal') and the famine beginning from 1958.

Stop, and move the bar to listen again from 38:00 to 44:20. This covers the period after the famine when Mao has made 'self-criticisms' about his policy and has distanced himself from the leadership, but is set to return with the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.