It’s so right, poor people will probably always have it worse than miserable royalty :at least most of them don’t starve (although if my reading are accurate. Some concubines of the worse harem (more than 2000 caged women) actually really did die of starvation - it’s still should be an exception)

My boyfriend told me that the harem stories i was reading were ridiculous because he read from a specialist that life was more peaceful and less murderous than whatever i read ( like no poisoning and no killing children and concubines, and so on) If you prove him wrong, I’ll have him eat his magazine !!! By the way su sucks more and more, as a bodyguard he was awkward but tolerable, but as an emperor, he seems sooo repulsive I’m having bad thoughts

I get what you mean, sometimes, there’s also a lot of charm keeping the original language, it’s true that it can give vibes of the culture which is pretty amazing Sadly there are only few fictions that really gave me a feel of what China might be (the architect apprentice is one of them) As for pronunciation, there’s a « universal «  phonetic alphabet which is very much latin letters, it’s rather bizarre but not too hard to get - i honestly hope the website will have evolved to allow your lexical, your comments at the bottom of the chapters are much appreciated :)

Freedom !!! Yay author, you know, we certainly don’t have the actual knowledge to blame you for your choices, but I seriously wanted to tell you that choosing simplicity is really the right way (and that’s also a professional point of view ;) - So thank you for minding our tired brain when we relax on a book, it’s so nice not too wonder about who’s who To that i can also add that strangely enough, i can confuse the characters when their names are too similar in this very very foreign language, but it’s also fun to realize that it’s way easier and much more pleasant to keep track of things when there’s an easily available translation of these names, maybe because i can finally find a way to relate to them - yet i still can’t count the number of stories i had to drop because i got lost with the next too identical names :/ In this novel the numbers of characters is not to much and the names are also very different, so it’s all good, but i still would love to have the finesse of these beautiful and meaningful names (to be honest, i also very much would love to hear them ;p)

It’s amazing right ? I went to the US once, and from the plane, i thought everything was super sized : the fields were like ten time bigger and so on New York and Chicago were so huge you could drive for a whole day without living the suburbs - but strangely enough, at least chicago center did not feel that impressive. It was beautiful, but it has no history compare to even smaller European town, so it kind so felt like you could see it all in a week (probably wrong, but i could never get that feel in Paris, London, Zurich or Venise … or New York for that matter :p) In any case United state still felt super sized : even the food portion were so much bigger , like a small coffee was half a liter, and a european small fries was to small to even exist - the small pizza was also so big we ate dinner and breakfast with it and the smallest bedroom at two queen sized bed (bigger that my own couple bed to this day !!) - i was 20 years ago, and it was also rather astonishing that some people needed to sit on two chair because they were also so incredibly large (it’s saddly something we ha been catching up with) - so big country, big surprises ? I can’t even start to imagine China or India as at least their population and cities seem so much bigger again, and on top of that they do have an incredible cultural heritage I once read about Japan that you can visit in a week but you would need 30 years to know … how much more would you need for china ? :D I certainly hope i’ll be able to visit someday So donyou live in a country with big distances, yet few people : Australia maybe ?

Thanks for the information about city size relativity !!! In europe 100 000 is a small city, and i’d thing 800 000 are probably just a handful per country :D