Word: emperor
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Toward the end of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh launch into a vigorous sword fight - and what a grand pleasure it is to watch these two world-class stars in action again. In the mid-'80s-to-mid-'90s Golden Age of Hong Kong films, Li was mainland China's most gifted movie martial artist and Yeoh the preeminent fighting femme. They played together in only one previous picture: Tai Chi Master in 1993, the busiest year of the Hong Kong Renaissance, when the colony's robust movies enthralled action fans around...
...Chinese Ursidae living in martial-arts monasteries--yeah, we're covered. But present-day, nonmagical, human China? Kung Fu Panda is set in a pre-industrial China, like Mulan and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The new Mummy sequel, Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, set in the 1940s, is about an undead 2,000-year-old Han emperor (Jet Li) and an army of terra-cotta warriors. The China that appears in American pop culture is about as modern as Arthurian England...
...Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor Directed by Rob Cohen; rated PG-13; out now Brendan Fraser takes his third crack at this Indiana Jones--knockoff action series. This time, a 2,300-year-old warrior (Jet Li) is trying to gain the secret to eternal mischief. Nifty stunts and effects and top turns from Chinese stars Michelle Yeoh, Isabella Leong and Anthony Wong are the treasures worth seeking amid the musty debris of Mummy...
When the Roman emperor Hadrian ascended to power in A.D. 117, he inherited a state in crisis. Trajan, his predecessor, had stretched the Roman Empire to its furthest reaches through aggressive military campaigns, sparking rebellions from Britain to the shores of the Persian Gulf. Once installed as ruler, Hadrian reversed the expansionist trend and withdrew troops from what is now Iraq. Thorsten Opper, a curator of Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum, says Hadrian realized then what coalition forces realize now: that it's easier to control territory through a friendly, well-functioning government than through occupation...
...Hadrian's interest in Greece went beyond state security. "He wanted to become a Greek," says Anthony Birley, author of the biography Hadrian: The Restless Emperor. Hadrian admired Greek language and architecture, and became the first emperor to sport a beard, then fashionable in the Greek world. Busts of Hadrian display his lavish curls, which specially trained slaves coiffed with irons...