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They were the most powerful rulers on earth.The mighty Qin Shi Huangdu (r. 221-210 BC), who began the construction of the Great Wall.The long-lived Han emperor Wudi (r. 141-87 BC), who developed China as a centralized Confucian state.The soldier-scholar Yongle (r. 1402-24 AD), who raised the Ming dynasty to its military peak.The dowager empress Cixi (r. 1861-1908 AD), who rose from humble Manchu origins to rule over all China.In The Dragon Throne, Jonathan Fenby tells the extraordinary story of imperial China through its 157 emperors, from Qin Shi Huangdu, who crushed his rivals to take supreme power as the first emperor in 221BC, until the final collapse of the faltering Manchu dynasty amidst the revolutionary chaos of the early twentieth century. The final emperor, the infant Puyi (r. 1908-12) ended his days as an assistant gardener in the very palace where he had been enthroned.
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Condition: New
Science tells us grand things about the universe: how fast light travels, and why stones fall to earth. But scientific endeavour goes far beyond these obvious foundations. There are some fields we don't often hear about because they are so specialised, or turn out to be dead ends. Yet researchers have given hallucinogenic drugs to blind people (seriously), tried to weigh the soul as it departs the body and planned to blast a new Panama Canal with atomic weapons.Real scientific breakthroughs sometimes come out of the most surprising and unpromising work. How to Make a Tornado is about the margins of science - not the research down tried-and-tested routes, but some of its zanier and more brilliant by-ways. Investigating everything from what it's like to die, to exploding trousers and recycled urine, this book is a reminder that science is intensely creative and often very amusing - and when their minds run free, scientists can fire the imagination like nobody else.