Word: mandarin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...tunghsi, or curio salesmen, find business rough. Their bronzes, brasswork and jade figurines bring only a quarter of the price they commanded last winter. One tunghsi man reminisces mournfully: "The mandarin coats-ah! We used to sell them for $20 apiece. When we ran out of real ones we went to the undertakers and bought up their supply of secondhand burial clothes. The burial clothes were even more ornate, and the Americans were twice as happy...
Throughout it all, the linguistic battle lines between the Mandarin-speaking refugees from the north and the laughing, dark-skinned Cantonese drew tighter and tighter. The northerners aloofly refused to attempt the Cantonese dialect and its eight singing tones (Mandarin has only four). They snootily reminded their hosts that Canton and Kwangtung Province had been declared a barbarous territory as recently...
...half later, Formosa's Governor Chen Cheng and Chen Yi, governor of Chiang's native Chekiang Province, were among a small group of officials who watched the Gimo's plane land. Following greetings, Chiang and his friends banqueted on fried shrimp, stuffed chicken and mandarin fish with sweet and sour sauce at Hangchow's famed Lou Wai Restaurant. Said one of the guests: "The Generalissimo seemed calm and relaxed-like one who has solved a great problem and is content...
After that came prayers and reading; then breakfast alone and the day's work. When he had military visitors, he donned his plain, unmedaled khaki uniform; otherwise he wore a dark blue mandarin gown with a black jacket. To save coal, the grate in his study was left unlit most days, and the Gimo wore a skullcap to keep his head warm...
...China some 900 years ago, there lived a thin-faced little man with a mandarin beard named Su Tungpo. According to Biographer Lin Yutang, Su Tungpo was "an incorrigible optimist, a great humanitarian, a friend of the people, a prose master, an original painter, a great calligraphist, an experimenter in winemaking, an engineer, a hater of puritanism, a yogi, a Buddhist believer, a Confucian statesman, a secretary to the emperor, a confirmed winebibber, a humane judge, a dissenter in politics, a prowler in the moonlight, a poet...