I've heard that I should see Chinese Ghost Story, but I haven't seen it yet. Some good anime uses the same premise -- clearly one with sound historical principals. Turns out that's what happened with Gengis Khan's family -- his sons pissed it all away, his daughters kept things running where they were left in charge, and those nations lasted longer. Sounds like as structured as it was, you had a much better chance of moving up in China than in Europe. In Europe, you always belonged to the class of your father, and that's part of why so few bastards were recognized. And if you married a man of a lower class, you lost most of your own perks, plus your children lost them, too.

Women are better at negotiating and looking ahead, it seems. But now so many play male politics, and that's not getting much done on the long-term needs front.

Have you found a good place to keep up your Mandarin? That's a gift you should not let slip! I knew that the many Chinese dialects are very different, and that the entire country doesn't have a language, in a sense (I sometimes think it's one reason they learn English, it's something they can agree to dislike but use.) I did not realize that Mandarin was that new, in the sense of being a major dialect. Would it have been called just the northeast dialect, centuries ago? And Beijing was a small area, wasn't it? But became powerful, and so the language became powerful? (English all over again.)