They've got me hooked on sweet & sour chicken and fried rice. Just like the Marseilles mob got all those dudes in NYC hooked on smack. I think it's part of a conspiracy.

Yours are a few of my favorite Mings!
Very clever and lexpertly crafted. A great title sub to boot.
Sorry, though--you'll have to distill the n-hexane and cull the lead from these fives before they're safe to handle...

Well done, my old china (Cockney slang - bet you don't know what china means, without looking it up).

I see the one-bomber didn't "Shun" your "Song" then.

Thanks all. Andy - I was almost 21 when I learned what "bloody" actually meant! lol ;D

Title switch of the day... The Powers that Be would do well to take heed. :)...( LOL @ TJC)

China was the world's leader in technology before the Renaissance in the West, say, around 1000-1500 A. D. In addition to gunpowder, they created spaghetti (Marco Polo took it back to Italy, and the rest, as they say, is pastary ;) , a clock, compass (and the discovery of the concept of true north, with magnetic declination towards the North Pole), papermaking, printing, matches, dry docks, the double-action piston pump, cast iron, the iron plouw, the horse collar, the multi-tube seed drill, the wheelbarrow, the suspension bridge, the parachute, natural gas as fuel, the raised-relief map, the propeller, the sluice gate, and the pound lock.

They theorized 1000 years ago that there was climate change in geological regions over an enormous span of time. Eat *that*, Al Gore!

... and a trillion other things, for most of which they are not recognized today. For a quickie intro,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology_in_China#Four_Great_Inventions_of_ancient_China

For a thorough discussion of the rise *and reasons for the fall*, read Jared Diamond's book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel". They used to send fleets of 400 ships with 700 men each (28,000 sailors at a time) 4,000 miles (6,400km) to India to trade, *then another 4,000 miles* to the east coast of Africa, for further trade. 16,000-mile (~25,000km) round trips, truly the first "Global Exonomy".

What went wrong? A jingoistic, xenophobic Administration that decided all things foreign were bad, and China should "turn inward", "focus on its own issues" (with no money from foreign trade?), and stop the global trading. In fact, not only were the shops burned, but the shipyards too were burned, so that no subsequent government could easily reverse this backslide. The result: China became a third-world, poverty-stricken nation until very recently, as it re-adoped de facto capitalsm (and our Pres expounds de facto socialism). Sad.

There's a lesson in here for us somewhere, as people cry for tariffs and trade restrictions, but *no one* learns from history, else it wouldn't keep repeating itself. 555

(I hope *you* know enough Chinese history; if not, the above is a good place to start. ;)

TT - 'Deed I Do (another old song title). As in so many things, I'd like to teach the 101 entry level classes and then turn the post graduate seminars over to you. Wait - that's what I did for 34 years of band directing...lol! ;D

I'm not as familiar with the material behind this as I would need to be to make an in depth review like TT, but suffice to say, it was very educationally sound. . .interesting. TT--I can say, I learned in economics, tariffs are bad for business:)

Dave, if *you* learned that, why have no Congresspersons or POTUSs learned that? The post-WWI and Depression-era "protective" tariffs were a contributing factor to global tension and prolonged Depression, making people receptive to scapegoating demagogues like Der Fuhrer.

Could you please tell that to our current Congress and POTUS?

I take it this is the one you meant with "who's got the last laugh now". I can relate, I remember when I was young and we used to laugh at "made in china" because it meant cheap plastic and low quality, ahhh... the good old days.

PS. There's a part in the book "outliers - a story of success" by Malcolm Gladwell (my new favorite book author) that explains why China has become more succesfull than the west and why their culture is more suitable for tech evolution and modern scholing systems than any other on the planet.