The Chinese history involved in this Canto struck me as bearing interpretation as a rejoinder to the misperception of China as being a closed and insular society that was later forced open by Western powers.

Within the Fifty-Ninth Canto are diplomatic meetings with the Tsarist Russia, the reading of Galileo’s works, and an emperor playing Bach (‘who played the spinet on Johnnie Bach’s birthday‘).

The opening struck me a little:

De libro CHI-KING sic censeo
wrote the young MANCHU, CHUN TCHI,
less a work of the mind than of affects
brought forth from the inner nature
here sung in these odes

The phrase ‘less a work of the mind than of affects‘ struck me as something I wished to have thought of, as an apt description, not so much of books, than of certain people.

P.S. I have  kept my promise to read and write about three Cantos but I will publish them over the course of three days (perhaps giving me time to get off my butt and read some more over the next couple of days and start to seriously catch up).