When I think of watch towers, especially on the frontier, what comes to mind is temporary wooden structures, typically mounted on the corners of field fortifications of the typical Roman legionary camp. These things are like supersized pillboxes.
Posted on 05/19/2015 1:00:43 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The man from Hunan province made headlines last month when all 17 women discovered each other when they rushed to his hospital bedside.
The allegation of fraud relates to sums of money which he regularly took from the deceived women, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
The women set up an online chat group called "revenge alliance", SCMP said.
It was on this chat group that they discovered he would ask some of his girlfriends for money every month, the paper said.
The man, identified only as Mr Yuan from the city of Changsha, in Hunan province, is reported to have had a child with one of the women and had been planning a wedding with another.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Post of the day!
Confucius say man with 17 girlfriends need 4 more for Black Jack.
And then this little piggie had none-Ha!
They chased me all the way to the top of the bleachers and cornered me in the up most corner!...........
Ah,good times!
Mr. Yuan must have a lot of yuan.
There is. That’s why these cases are perplexing. The expected surge in prostitution has happened as everyone predicted. Why then are there so many cases of mistresses (and I don’t mean for money), multiple girlfriends, bigamy, etc.? It seems counter-intuitive.
There's always been a shortage. Up until the 1950's, polygamy was the law of the land. Wealthy men had as many as they could support, and single men sought the comfort of professionals. It did not help Chinese men that marriage has always involved the payment of a hefty bride price to the bride's parents. The ban instituted on polygamy, and the increasing tendency for women to stay single well into their late 20's (vs the traditional arranged marriage in their late teens) has actually increased the prospects for single men to at least kick the tires, rather than seek the services of professionals at the karaoke bar, massage parlor or hair salon.
Then why are there so damn many Chinese?.................
Because China has been an advanced civilization - in the sense of a settled kingdom able to support large populations on marginal soil - for a very long time. Everyone's heard about the Great Wall. IMO, China's first major practical engineering feat was its building of the 120-mile Han Canal 2500 years ago, which served simultaneously as flood control structure, waterway and irrigation aid.
The US population has grown far faster than China's. In 1800, China's population was 300m compared to 5m stateside. Today, China's population is about 1.3b vs the 320m stateside. The Chinese population is about 4x what it used to be, whereas the US population is about 60x.
By comparison, around the time Christ was born, the Roman Empire included ~5m people vs the Han Empire's ~60m. In other words, it has taken China 2000 years to increase its population 20x, whereas it has only taken the US 200 years to expand its population 60+x.
When I think of watch towers, especially on the frontier, what comes to mind is temporary wooden structures, typically mounted on the corners of field fortifications of the typical Roman legionary camp. These things are like supersized pillboxes.
“What’s his diet?”
He eats unicorn horns like carrot sticks.
What were they watching for? SANDWORMS of DUNE?.........
Imagine being the lowly soldiers picked to man that outpost! They must have been the total screw-ups of their day!............
China doesn’t have an ‘immigration’ problem like we do............B^)
The Huns, who were pushed out of the region north of China, and went on to give the Roman empire a run for its money.
Imagine being the lowly soldiers picked to man that outpost! They must have been the total screw-ups of their day!............
Actually, these guys were pros, which is how these structures got built. They were expensive to recruit, train and maintain (as opposed to the traditional farmer conscripts), and the cost of their upkeep possibly played a part in the eventual collapse of the dynasty. I read a (U of Eastern Illinois?) monograph about the subject that estimated that the annual cost of this 200K+, mostly cavalry, force aimed at quelling the persistent Hun threat ate up several times the annual tax revenues of the empire, resulting in several rounds of tax hikes, aristocratic as well as peasant rebellions and the systematic devaluation of the currency (via adulteration with base metals). The Han Empire's rulers were damned if they did (counter Hun cavalry raids deep inside the empire by raising an expensive professional, mostly cavalry army), and damned if they didn't (thereby subjecting themselves to ever-bolder and more damaging raids).
They had huge amounts of immigration - of tribes seeking protection from their traditional enemies (including the Huns) but were unwilling to submit to those enemies and looking for the benefits of Chinese civilization, which was a magnet for surrounding regions. It's not an accident that China's neighbors derive a good chunk of their script and their culture from China. China was, to its neighbors, what the US is to Latin America.
Sun Tzu - The Art of War
They must not have read this part:
1. Sun Tzu said: Raising a host of a hundred thousand men and marching them great distances entails heavy loss on the people and a drain on the resources of the State. The daily expenditure will amount to a thousand ounces of silver. There will be commotion at home and abroad, and men will drop down exhausted on the highways. As many as seven hundred thousand families will be impeded in their labor. -
They were well-versed in it - the text was part and parcel of a princely education. Sun was referring to expeditions to distant lands not presenting a threat to the realm. The Huns, via their hugely damaging and ever-bolder raids into China, had to be stopped, lest defections (from the Chinese empire, i.e. troops and civilians) strengthen them to the point that they became a serious rival to the empire. And that is precisely how Genghis Khan's descendants came to rule an empire roughly the size of the British empire at its peak - benign neglect by the settled nations on the borders of the Mongol tribes. By evicting the Huns, the Han rulers guaranteed that their successors would rule for the next 200+ years. By bribing and paying off the Mongols instead of mobilizing their kingdoms for all-out war (thereby risking the negative effects of excessive taxation, famine and so on), the Tangut, Khitan and Chinese rulers ensured that their ruling clans were wiped out in a matter of decades. Bottom line is that it's never that simple - uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.
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