Their children and grand children were very good rulers, esp. when they did not have much experience. They spread the cultures and technologies between east and west. Marco Polo and later Columbus had to thank him.

John Wayne must have a tough time in hell to face the Chinese and Indians he killed. Columbus really thought the American natives were Indians when he thought he reached India, which was next street to China for him.

I’ve never considered Mongolians to be Chinese. I’ve always considered them to have been the barbarians at the gates, so to speak. And the funniest bit of casting in Hollywood history had to be John Wayne as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror.

I always had an impression that WWI was regarded by many as mostly a pointless and brutal meat grinder for the foot soldiers. So I can certainly understand your sentiment. I didn’t intend to imply that people in UK regarded WWI as good vs. evil. And your comment just made clear that some in UK shared the non-approving view of that war and its parties, as some in China do.

BTW, I was strictly providing information in my comment #6. I personally do not subscribe to the idea that WWII was good vs. evil.

This is a total aside, but I remember the great difficulty I had trying to explain the meaning of the Wilfred Owen poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est ‘ to final-year Chinese English students. I had grown up being taught such poetry from an early age (it started at age 8, with the 70th anniversary of the end of WW1), but here were people who had seemingly only ever experienced such poetry through the lens of patriotism and pro-war sentiment. Here was perhaps the greatest and most profound anti-war poem ever written, made more profound still for having been written by a young man destined to die, but even after a good two hours of working over the meaning of the poem, nobody could even hazard a guess as to what it was about. This was not even about shyness, or misunderstanding, I had checked that they understood every sentence and thoroughly explained every archaism. I simply got the feeling that they couldn’t see how a brave soldier could be anti-war. One of the students even later said that she thought the poem was wrong, that people should not agree with it because they should want to fight to defend their country. it was one of my most depressing experiences ever, in China or elsewhere, I was not looking for my students to agree with my own sentiments, far from it, but their inability to suggest any explanation as to what Wilfred Owen was trying to say was shocking.

However, I will repeat again what I said before, I do not expect people who did not grow up in the same country that I did, and who were not made by their teachers to bow their heads for 2 minutes at 11 o’clock on the 11th of November every year to understand the sentiments that surround this date, but I thought that Wilfred Owen spoke in a language comprehensible to all. I was wrong, obviously.

However, I’ll still recommend Graves, Sassoon, McRae, and Owen to anyone who wishes to understand the history of those times, and indeed the nature of war in general.

I believed he captured Poland and Hungary plus some Russian cities. I forgot whether he stayed there to rule them or not as they’re pretty far away. He just robbed, raped, enslaved, and asked them to tribute their treasures every year.

Genghis Khan is a bad guy by any standard. Europe actually benefited a lot by learning China’s technology like gun powder, navigation skill…