And I thought my thesis would never come in handy

This is a post about how my thesis is serving a purpose, that being winning me things.
I was aware that no one outside of Reed was ever going to want to hear too much about my thesis so when I graduated I tucked all that information away for safe keeping. Sometimes it gets out but it usually runs into disinterested looks and retreats to safety. However sometimes it gets out and wins me things.

While I was in Beijing I was skimming the That's Beijing and ran across an article about Emperor Qianlong's love life. Now Qianlong and I spent a lot of time together as he ordered the creation of all the works I was studying and perhaps oddly so did his love life. The article presented a bunch of myths that erked me since I had spent weeks wading though crap like the thing I was ready to get to the truth of the matter. The matter? Among other things, the article talked about XiangFei, a muslim concubine of Qianlong's. Tale has it that he was so in love with her that he gave her everything, but she never submitted to him because he had killed her husband, the leader of a Uhyger tribe. In the end she was supposedly murdered by Qianlong's mother. Why does this relate to my thesis? She was also supposed to live in the European garden's whose prints I wrote about. The truth, thanks to Millward (click here to read the article if you have JSTOR, the interest and the time) that she existed, but did none of the things alleged and she didn't live in the gardes, infact no one did.

Anyway, (see I let that thesis dialogue loose again) I was irritated that the magazine was furthering falsehoods and with my fellow Reedie, Eben's urging and no real reason to go to bed, I wrote a letter to the magazine complaining and noting that the real interest in this story is not that "it could be true" but that is has recently come to be meaningful to Chinese resistance in Xinjiang (I put it more tactfully than that as I wouldn't want to be noticably counter revolutionary)and because it brings up the question most relavent to me, why did this concubine come to be associated with Europe when she was from what today is either Xingjiang or one of the 'stans.

The end of this story is that, not only did I get published, but I won the letter of the month award and a gift certificate to a fancy Thai restaurant in Beijing. Those of you out there just finishing up your drafts, know that there may be a future for that bulk of paper, even if you don't go get a PhD.

Here is the full letter though I think I summerized pretty well:

Although it is always enjoyable to read another article about the
endlessly amusing Emperor Qianlong, it's a shame that Ed Lanfranco
felt the need to perpetuate unlikely myths in his article "Qianlong's
Love Tales." Although Hope Danby's book may be "delightful" it is over
50 years old and more than a little outdated. A better source would
have been Jame's Milward's article "A Uyghur Muslim in Qianlong's
Court." This article effectively debunks the riveting Xiang Fei myth
through actual research, showing that she was probably not murdered
and that neither she nor any other individual ever lived in the
European palaces at the Yuan Mingyuan. Reality may not be as
interesting as myth on the surface, but the light shed on eighteenth
century thought about Uyghur Qing relations and their resonances is
much more rewarding. In addition it should be noted that Heshen was
not executed for being Qianlong's lover as the article suggests, but
for the incredible corruption he was involved in.

-Ariel Jacobs