Well, Rosie, I'm back, having spent the week from Holy Saturday till the next at Queen's Hospital with a wicked pneumonia of my right lung, which had spread to my blood. My condition now is stabilized, and I no longer spit blood--but I came as close as I ever like to think to brain damage (fever of nearly 106 degrees fahrenheit) and grim death. So what did I think about as I lay near-dying? Saving the Chang brothers (favorites in her old age of the Empress Wu Zetian), of course. Where in the world could they have got to, with a fair start ahead of the "Elder Statesmen," in the year 697 a.d., that they could have lived out their lives in peace and civilized comfort? Japan, perhaps. Constantinople, maybe. Or was not India, or some part of it, having something like a Golden Age about then? Certainly they would want to have given the Moche People, then on the rise, a wide berth. And the Classic Maya, nearing their apogee of sadistic artistic and mathematical complexity, might have been interesting, but scarcely tranquil circumstances for the last days of a couple of world-weary drag queens. On the whole, I think I'd have opted for Japan, if I'd been them, and been clever enough to plan my escape, instead of trying to face down the concerted Confucian powers of a cruel dynasty in transition.

But while thinking of these things, it occurred to me that I've only recently re-read Lady Sei Shonagon's marvelous Pillow Book--and the thing that's different about the Chinese and the Japanese imperial courts, is the astonishing, virtually total, absence of physical cruelty in the latter. As if nobody had ever heard, among the Japanese, of having people beaten to death on a whim of the Emperor. Curious.