boys who rocked the world

8/2/2019 Boys Who Rocked the World

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Heroes from King Tut to Shaun White

Hillsboro, OregonALADDINNew York London Toronto Sydney New Delhi

MICHELLEROEHMMCCANN

BOYS WHOROCKED THE WORLD


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ALADDINAn imprint of Simon & SchusterChildrens Publishing Division

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Tis Aladdin/Beyond Words edition October 2012Copyright 2012 by Michelle Roehm McCannIllustrations copyright 2012 by Beyond Words Publishing, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.ALADDIN is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc., and related logo is a registered

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Managing editor: Lindsay S. BrownEditors: Emmalisa Sparrow, Ali McCartDesign: Sara E. BlumIllustrations: David HahnTe text of this book was set in Adobe Garamond Pro.Te illustrations for this book were rendered in Adobe Illustrator.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

K

ISBN: 978-1-58270-331-2 (pbk)ISBN: 978-1-58270-362-6 (hc)ISBN: 978-1-4424-5456-9 (eBook)


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CONTENTSCONTENTS

King utankhamunPharaoh 1Galileo GalileiInventor and Physicist 6Blaise PascalMathematician, Scientist, and Philosopher 11KangxiEmperor 16

Wolfgang Amadeus MozartComposer 20John Quincy AdamsPresident, Politician, and Abolitionist 25

Louis BrailleTeacher and Inventor 30Los Nios HroesSoldiers 36Crazy HorseWarrior and Leader 39Okita SojiSwordsman 45homas Alva EdisonInventor 50Chester GreenwoodInventor 56George Washington CarverBotanist 60

Matthew Alexander HensonExplorer 66Pablo PicassoArtist 71Albert EinsteinPhysicist 76Jos Ral CapablancaChess Player 81Salvatore FerragamoShoe Designer 86

Jesse OwensAthlete 91Nelson MandelaActivist 97

Stan LeeWriter and Illustrator 105Vidal SassoonHair Stylist 110Mau PiailugExplorer 115he Dalai LamaSpiritual and Political Leader 120


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Elvis PresleyKing of Rock n Roll 126Bruce LeeMartial Artist and Actor 134PelAthlete 139Bob DylanSinger 144

Chico MendesActivist 150Stephen KingWriter 156Stevie WonderSinger 161Matt GroeningCartoonist 166

Yo-Yo MaMusician 171Bill GatesSoftware Developer 175Steve JobsComputer Programmer, Inventor 181

Cameron CroweJournalist and Movie Director 186Sherman AlexieWriter 191Will SmithActor 196ony HawkAthlete 200Hrithik RoshanActor 206he Black Eyed PeasMusicians 211Mark ZuckerbergSoftware Developer 216

Shaun WhiteAthlete 221William KamkwambaInventor, Engineer 226Om Prakash GurjarActivist 231he Billy Elliot BoysDancers 236

Recommended Resources 241End Notes 250


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King Tutankhamun13471329 BCYPHAROAHYEGYPT

As my eyes grew accustomed to the lightI was struck dumb with amazement.

HOWARD CARTER, ARCHAEOLOGIST, REFERRING TO THE DISCOVERY OF KING TUTS TOMB

T

en-year-old utankhamun nervously approached the great Karnak

emple. Te last in a long line of rulers, young ut was to becrowned pharaoh of Egypt. It was now his job to oversee the larg-est empire in the world, which stretched from Africa to Asia. Will I beremembered as a great leader too?he wondered as he walked past thegreat monuments and statues of the pharaohs who had ruled beforehim. Te cheers from the crowd at the temple grew to a deafening roaras the boy entered. Would the boy pharaoh bring prosperity back to

Egypt? He was their last hope.Several priests poured sacred water from golden urns over ut. Tenthey placed the magnificent three crowns of Egypt on his head. Terewas the tall, white crown of Lower Egypt, then the red crown of Upper


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Egypt, and finally the Kepresh, a blue crown representing Egypts vastarmies. Tousands of Egyptians looked on in hushed silence as thepriests balanced the triple crown on uts small head.

Even though his reign was briefonly nine yearsuts dream to

be remembered came true. Tough he ruled over three thousand yearsago, he is now the most well-known of all the Egyptian pharaohs. Asruler, he helped return a crumbling empire to its former prosperity andstability. His tomb, filled with an immense wealth of gold and price-less artifactsas well as a mysterious cursehas only helped solidifyyoung uts legend.

King ut was born in 1347 BC in Egypts rich, green Nile valley.

His name, utankhamun, meant strong bull, which suited ut well.As a young man, he was praised forhis strength and skills as a hunter ofostriches, peacocks, ibexes, gazelles andwild hippos. His father was Pharaoh

Akhenaten, who was not well-likedby Egyptians since he had defied the

traditional religion, which had manygods, and singled out one god as worthy of worship. Akhenaten had alsomoved the capitol from Tebes to Amarna, further angering his people.

Growing up in Amarna, young ut was a bit of a slacker. His olderbrother, Smenkare, was next in line to be pharaoh, so not much wasexpected of ut. When he wasnt learning to read or write Egyptianhieroglyphs (pictures that represent words), ut did what most kids

do today: he goofed off. He hunted and raced around in chariots,played Senet, his favorite board game, and swam in the Nile with hissiblings.

When ut was seven years old, he received the shock of his life.Smenkare got very sick and died. Suddenly, ut was destined to inheritall his fathers duties as pharaoh of Egypt. No more slackingit wastime to cram! uts lessons got a lot harder as he prepared for his new

role. Good thing he crammedjust two years later his father died. Onlynine years old, ut was now the ruler of the Egyptian empire and hadthe huge responsibility of unifying Egypt after his fathers rocky reign.

ut decided to bring back the traditional religion his father had out-

Pharaoh means one whoresides in the palace.

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lawed and to return the capital to Tebes. When the young pharaohmoved back to the capital, a coronation ceremony was arranged so thatall of Egypt could be introduced totheir new boy king. Once crowned, ut

quickly ordered the rebuilding of theold temples that had fallen into disre-pair during his fathers reign. With theguidance of priests, he performed cer-emonies to improve the harvest (mostpeople in Egypt made their living fromfarming). ut was also in charge of

Egypts gigantic army, and with thehelp of his military advisers, he wonseveral battles.

By age fifteen, ut was growing intoa strong and trustworthy leader. Hebrought stability back to Lower andUpper Egypt, and comfort to people

who honored the traditional religion. ut was also proving to be askilled negotiator, helping to solidify relations between Egypts neigh-bors, Assyria and Babylonia. Egypt, which had experienced dark daysduring Akhenatens reign, was making a comeback. Crops along theNile were bountiful, and Egypts many storehouses overflowed.

But King uts reign ended almost as quickly as it began. At the ageof eighteen, King utankhamun suddenly died. No one is sure why.

Was it disease? Was it an injury from one of his chariot rides? Its stilla mystery today. Many scholars believe that ut was assassinated bysomeone close to him who wanted his power. Maybe ut was becomingtoo independent and would no longer listen to his advisers.

Whatever the cause of his death, it was a shock to the Egyptianpeople. Te Egyptians believed that in order to preserve a persons Ka,or soul, the dead body had to be mummified and placed in a tomb.

Since uts death was unexpected, the Egyptians had to work franti-cally to put together a tomb for their king. Inside the tomb, they placeditems that would keep their king entertained and comfortable in theafterlife. Ten they created false chambers and hidden passageways to

In his tomb, Tut wasburied with over 140pieces of jewelry,

including fifteen rings,thirteen bracelets, manyamulets, and a crownmade of pure gold. He

also had 93 pairs ofshoes and 415 statuesof servants to serve him

in the afterlife.

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lead robbers away from its many treasures. Tree thousand years passedand shifting sands, grain by grain, covered the burial areauts tombvanished from sight.

Much of what we know today about King uts life comes from his

tomb. In 1922 archeologist Howard Carter uncovered a buried cham-ber in an area of Egypt called the Valley of the Kings, where most of thepharaohs were buried. Behind a secret door, Carter found the tomb ofKing ut, almost perfectly preserved. It contained amazing artifactsagolden mask and coffin, food vessels, jewelry, chariots, bows and arrows,statues of servants, game boards, furniture, and a magnificent throne.

Among the treasures, Carter discovered a clay tablet with hiero-

glyphs on it that warned: Death shall slay with his wings, whoeverdisturbs the peace of the Pharaoh. He also found a statue that read:It is I who drive back the robbers of the tomb with the flames of thedesert. I am the protector of uts grave. With his eyes on the othertreasures, Carter quickly forgot the warning words until two weeks laterwhen Lord Carnarvon, the man who had paid for the expedition, gotsick and died. Some thought it was from malaria, but others believed

it was King uts curse. Next, a friend of Lord Carnarvon visited thetomb. Te following day he got a high fever and suddenly died! Soon allsorts of deaths were linked to the dis-covery of uts tomb. Within ten yearsof opening the tomb, almost thirtypeople connected to the excavation hadmysteriously died.

Finally, Dr. Ezzeddin aha, whohad examined several people involvedin the excavation of Egyptian tombs,noticed that many of them sufferedfrom a strange fungal infection. Hisresearch revealed that some fungi couldsurvive for up four thousand years in

mummies and tombs! Symptoms ofthe infection were a high fever andan upper respiratory infection. Dr. aha made a public statement say-ing that superstitions about King uts curse were silly, especially now

In ancient Egypt, menand women both woreblack eye makeup made

of lead ore. The makeupwas considered stylishbut also helped protectthe Egyptians from eyeinfections and the harsh,

desert sun.

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HOW WILLYOUROCK THE WORLD?My plan is to get high up in the government and then propose the Eco-car bill.There would be a recycling program where people would trade in their gas guz-

zling cars for a small amount of money. Charging stations for electric cars will

be placed all around the country, and the electricity will be inexpensive. This bill

would make it so a lot more people will use public transportation. This will affect

many people because it will boost awareness about global warming and reduce

our carbon footprint.

DUNGANMARIEBYAGE 13

f

HOW WILLYOUROCK THE WORLD?

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that he had found the real reason people were dying. Coincidentally,after making this important scientific breakthrough, Dr. aha died ina car crash. People today still debatewhether aha died because of the curse

or because he had the fungal infection,which may have caused him to pass outand crash the car.

King uts death and tomb maybe shrouded in mystery, but it is nomystery that, as one of the youngestpharaohs of Egypt, his memory lives

on. His leadership and diplomacy skillshelped strengthen Egypts economyand return peoples confidence in thepharaohs. His short life, his amazing tomb, and its curse have madehim the most famous and well-known of all Egyptian kings. Like theancient scribes of Egypt wrote, Let your name go forth, while yourmouth is silent. For no other pharaoh has this been more true than for

King ut.

X-rays of themummified Tut showthat he might havedied from a head

injurymore proof forthose who think he was

murdered.

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Galileo Galilei15641642 YINVENTOR AND PHYSICIST YITALY

Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsiblefor the birth of modern science. Galileo was one of the first toargue that man could hope to understand how the world works, and

moreover that we could do this by observing the world.STEPHEN HAWKING, THEORETICAL PHYSICIST

Galileo was bored. After a week of studying math at the university,he had been looking forward to a good Sunday church serviceto fill his brain with more spiritual thoughts. Unfortunately, the

visiting priest was so dull that Galileo couldnt keep his head from drop-ping onto his chest. Snapping it to attention, he overcompensated andthrew his head back too far. Something on the ceiling caught his eye. A

lamp, hanging from a chain high overhead, was swaying in the air cur-rents. Its rhythmic arcs almost put him back to sleep, but then Galileonoticed something that surprised him: there seemed to be a pattern tothe swings.


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Wide awake now, he used his own pulse to time how long it took thelantern to swing from one end of its arc to the other. He realized some-thing: each swing took the same amount of time, whether the lanternhad swung wide in a new breeze, or had settled into a barely noticed

sway when the air currents quieted.Duh, you might say; that seems obvious. But it wasnt a duhthen.People four hundred years ago hadhardly a clue about what made thephysical world work. With this obser-vation, eighteen-year-old Galileodiscovered the way to invent the first

accurate mechanical clock, beginninga lifetime of experiments to figureout how the world works. He was theworlds first physicist (a scientist whostudies matter and energy and howthey interact).

Galileos curiosity would nearly

get him killed later in life, but it alsostarted humans down the road ofknowledge to mechanics, electricity,radiation, and nuclear reactions. Froma boring church service in Pisa in 1583to a walk on the moon in 1969, andfinally to nanotechnology today, there

have been curious men and women, pulling more and more from thespool of scientific knowledge that Galileo started to unravel.Galileos greatness came from his skepticism: he refused to believe

something just because everyone else did. He came by this naturally; asa boy, Galileo had been taught by his father, who hated close-mindedpeople, especially if they were in a position of authority.

By the time Galileo was eleven, his father could not keep up with his

thirst for knowledge, so he sent his son to a monastery school. Te peace-ful life inside the monastery walls totally appealed to Galileo, so muchso that, at thirteen, he volunteered to begin training as a monk. Hisdad was horrified and instantly nixed the idea: Galileo needed to pick

Galileo said that a lockof wool and a piece

of lead, if in a vacuum

(with no air resistance),would fall at the samerate. In 1971, astronautDavid Scott stood on

the moon and dropped afeather and a hammerat the same time. They

both fell side by side tothe moons surface. Heremarked: This proves

Mr. Galileo was correct.

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a career that would generate enoughmoney to help support the family. Andfour hundred years ago, just like today,doctors got paid big bucks. So, at his

fathers insistence, when Galileo wasseventeen he entered the University ofPisa to study medicine. But he was notinterested in medicine, and he arguedwith his father to be allowed to studymatha profession that would helphim figure out how the world worked.

He must have been a good arguer because his father gave in. As Galileolater said of his passion for math:

the universe cannot be understood unless one first learns to compre-hend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written.It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters aretriangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which it is

humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.

At Pisa, Galileo kept on arguing with people who supposedlyknew more. He argued so much that his teachers nicknamed him Il

Attaccabrighe, the Wrangler. What was he arguing about? Galileo feltthat the facts they were teaching should not be accepted until someonehad tested them.

When he was twenty-one, Galileo left school without earning adegree. Four years later, he was back, this time as an instructor. Hebegan teaching math and went back to his old argumentative ways. Atthat time, universities were still following the teachings of Aristotle,who had lived 1,800 years earlier. One thing Aristotle had said was thatthe heavier an object was, the faster it would fall. Aristotle had neveractually tried it; it just seemed to logically flow from other things he

had observed.Galileo easily proved this idea wrong: he climbed the Leaning owerof Pisa and dropped two lead balls, one weighing much more than theother. As his critics watched, an 1,800-year-old truth was overturned:

The Catholic Churchwas very powerful inItaly in Galileos day.

In Rome, everyone wasCatholic, and one outof every twelve peoplewas a priest or a nun.

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in order to force him to lie about his discoveries, but he never totallygave in. He always continued writing and teaching the truth, even whenthe pope and the Inquisition (the Catholic Churchs secret police) cameafter him. For the last eight years of his life, Galileo had to live under

house arrest inside his home in Florencebut he never stopped con-ducting his experiments.Some heroes die rather than admit something that they dont believe

in. Why didnt Galileo defend what he believed to the death? Maybehe wanted to live to make more discoveries. Or perhaps he knew that,whether he lived or died, the truth would eventually be known. And ofcourse it was. oday everyone, even the Catholic Church, believes that

Galileo was right.In the end, Galileos greatest legacy is not any one of his inventionsor discoveries, but more his search for truth, even in the face of ignorantlaws and rulers. In Galileos day, the enemy of truth was people clingingto unproven beliefs. What is the enemy of truth today?

ROCK ON!JACOBBARNETT

Jacob Barnett shocked his parents when, at three years old, he was solving five-

thousand-piece puzzles and memorizing road maps. He taught himself geometry,

trigonometry, algebra, and calculus, all within a week! He enrolled in his first

college-level astrophysics class when he was eight, and at twelve, he was work-

ing on expanding Einsteins theory of relativity. Jacob has aspergers syndrome,

a mild form of autism, but instead of being treated as though he were weird, his

family, professors, and classmates show him respect and support as he explores

concepts most people cant understand.

ROCK ON!f f


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Blaise Pascal16231662 YMATHEMATICIAN, SCIENTIST, AND PHILOSOPHER

FRANCE

No matter how little time he had left for [math], he madesuch strides that at the age of sixteen he wrote a paper on theconic sections which was considered such an important intellectualachievement that it was said that nothing so powerful had been

seen since Archimedes.

GILBERTE PASCAL, BLAISES SISTER

Twelve-year-old Blaise froze silently as he waited to hear the frontdoor close, signaling his fathers departure. With a thump, thewood door fell into place, and Blaise scurried to pull out his math

notes. Hed been examining triangles and felt he was on the verge of

discovering something important.He loved shapes, but his father, tienne, forbade him from learn-ing mathematics, particularly geometry, until he was fifteen. tiennebelieved that classic studies like Latin should be learned first and feared


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that his son would abandon them ifhe had the chance to study math. ButBlaise couldnt help himself! Te factthat his father had banished all books

and objects related to math only fueledhis desire to study them.Blaise tapped his quill on the cor-

ners of the triangle hed just drawn. Herealized that if he combined the anglesof all the corners, they would maketwo right angles, ninety degrees each.

He quickly drew another triangle withall different angles. It was true again!Te young mathematician was so engrossed in his discovery that he

didnt hear his father enter and walk up behind him until it was too late.Hed been found out.

What are you doing? his father asked.Im Blaise fumbled for an excuse but realized he had none. Im

investigating a certain matter.tienne then leaned over to examine his sons notes. Without a word,he nodded, turned, and walked away. Later that night, Blaises fatherexplained to him that he had discovered the truth of Euclids thirty-sec-ond propositionthat the angles of any triangle add up to 180 degrees.

I want you to have this. He held out a leather-bound book.Blaise ran his fingers over the smooth coverit was Euclids Elements,

Book I. His father was granting him permission to study math!Blaise Pascal was born in a small town in France, but when hismother died when he was just three years old, his father moved Blaiseand his three sisters to Paris. tienne didnt like the schools in Paris,though, so he decided to teach his children himself, which is when hemade the wretched no-math rule. After Blaises secret math studies hadbeen found out, though, his father let him study math as much as he

wantedas long as he continued to learn Latinand he could even goto the mathematical academy meetings with his dad!Age sixteen was a big year for Blaise, and not because he got his

drivers license like most teenagers do today. He developed his first the-

Blaise loved shapes. Hismost famous researchhas to do with cones,

cycloids (the curvecreated if you were totrack the movement ofa specific point on a ballas it rolled in a straight

line), and triangles.

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orema mathematical theory that can be provencalling it the mystichexagram. Ten he wrote a book called Essay on Conic Sections. Whenhis father was relocated to Rouen to be a tax collector that same year,Blaise started thinking of a device that would help with all the math

involved in his fathers job. It would be complicated, though, becauseFrench money was not in multiples often. Instead, there were twelve diniersin a sol and twenty sols in a livre. Butby 1645, he had it! Blaise had inventeda calculating machine, much like digi-tal calculators we use to today. It was

called a Pascaline.When his father suffered a terribleaccident and couldnt leave the house,the Pascals found support in the reli-gious community, particularly the

Jansenists. People from the churchcame to the house to help Blaise and

his sisters and to teach them about aconvent called Port Royal.During this time, Blaise was

still studying math and conductingexperiments. He was fascinated withatmospheric pressure and the possi-bility of a vacuuma place where no

atmospheric pressure exists. In 1648 heproved that pressure in the atmospheredecreases the farther it is from theEarth. From this, he deduced that spacemust be a vacuum. Ren Descartes,another famous French mathematicianat the time, often argued with Blaise

about this theory, but we now knowthat Blaise was right.Blaise also developed the theory of

probability with Pierre de Fermat. Te

Blaise studied a certainkind of triangle so much,it was named after him,even though he wasnt

the first person to workwith it.

The Pascal triangle ismade up of numbers,the top row being a

one. Moving down fromthere, numbers in rows

are determined byadding the two numbersabove them. It may

sound simple, but themathematical formula

for this is:

1

1

1 1

1 2 1

1 3 3 1

1 4 6 4 1

1 5 10 10 5 1

n

k( )n - 1

k

n - 1

k - 1= +

( ) ( )


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two men realized they had been thinking the same thing at almost thesame time and decided to work together. Tey focused on the dice prob-lem, which asks how many times one must throw a pair of dice beforedouble sixes can be expected, and the problem of points, which asks

how to divide the stakes in an unfinished game of dice.Te more Blaise learned about Jansenism during this time, though,the more he focused on religion. Jansenism teaches that followersshould devote all their time to God, so in 1654, three years after hisfather died, Blaise moved to Port Royal. From this time on, his math-ematical writings are rare and short, though often profound. He didtake on philosophical and religious writing, though, especially when

his friend Antoine Arnauld went to trial for his Jansenist beliefs. Blaiseanonymously published eighteen Provincial Letters that appeared to bebetween two friendsone in the city and one in the countrywho

make fun of the Jesuits, the most influ-ential Christians of the time.

Blaise also wrote Penses, his phi-losophy on religion. Here, his writing

maintains his methodical writing styleand sometimes sounds almost as if hessolving theorems of geometry or prob-ability. He writes, If God does notexist, one will lose nothing by believing

in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing.Trough much of his later life, Blaise suffered from stomach and

head pain. Shortly after writing Penses, the pain was so bad that Blaisecould not fall asleep, and he lay awake thinking about math. He studiedcycloids and decided he should challenge his fellow mathematicians, sohe wrote two theorems, which he invited his colleagues to prove.

In his last years, he again abandoned math and focused on thechurch, attending service after service whenever he wasnt giving to thepoor.

Blaise invented thesyringe. Imagine what

life would be like todaywithout that!

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HOW WILLYOUROCK THE WORLD?My dream is to become an aerospace engineer and create exploratory vehicles

that go to Pluto and Proxima Centauri. I might design public shuttles to the moon

and Mars with fuel tanks that could be fastened on in case of fire, sleeping cabins

close to the galley, oxygen, and food supplies, and nuclear-powered engines.

The ejectable sleeping cabins would have ram motorsmotors that magneticallyattract the hydrogen thinly spread through space and then burn it with an oxidizer.

I could see it all now, me a famous aerospace engineer changing the way people

travel.

NEILFORRESTERYAGE 10f



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Kangxi16541722YEMPERORYCHINA

He deserves to be called a wise ruler throughthe middle years of his reign.

FREDERICK W. MOTE, AUTHOR

S

even-year-old Xuanye looked on as his father moaned from his bed,

sick with a fever and a rash. Te Emperor Shunzhi had small pox.Although Xuanye had survived the disease when he was younger,most people who developed the rash back then didnt live for long.

Its up to you now, Shunzhi told his son. Be a wise ruler.Xuanye nodded solemnly. He would be the youngest emperor in the

history of China.Once Xuanye became emperor, his name was changed to Kangxi, and

he was the second ruler in the Qing Dynasty of China. Because Kangxiwas only seven, though, when his father appointed him emperor, he alsoappointed four advisers to help him. Tese men were corrupt, though,and wanted the throne for themselves. Tey plotted to kick Kangxi out


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of his role as emperor, and one even had another one killed to beat outthe competition! By the time Kangxi was fourteen, hed had enough ofit, and he fired the one remaining adviser so he could rule on his own.

Kangxi is known for bringing cultures together. He was multicul-

turalManchurian on his fathers side, Han Chinese on his mothers,and Mongolian on his grandmothersand he felt he was a strongerperson because of it. He learned the Mongolian tradition of ridinghorses, knew the Manchurian skill of hunting with a bow and arrow,and studied Confucian thought per the Han Chinese tradition.

Not everyone in Asia thought multiculturalism was a good thing,though, and Ming Dynasty followers in the south and in aiwan

resisted Kangxis rule. Likewise, the northern borders were churningwith unrest as Mongolians clashed against Kangxi and Russia invaded.Kangxi responded with many trips tothe south to talk with the Ming fol-lowers. He showed his respect for theirtraditions and culture by asking themto write a history of the Ming Dynasty.

Ten he went to Mongolia. Whenthe Mongolians saw Kangxi with hiseighty thousand troops and hundredsof cannons, while they had just bowsand arrows, they didnt fight back.Finally, Kangxi met with Russian rul-ers to sign a treaty about the border. It

was the first time in a many years thatChina had not been at war.Kangxi was also fascinated with

Western culture. During his rule, Jesuitmissionaries from the Christian worldcame to China. Tey taught Kangxiabout astronomy and medicine, and

he taught them about Confucianthought and Chinese traditions. Tisfriendship came in handy when Kangxi caught malaria when he wasforty. Chinese medicine didnt know how to cure the disease, so he

Because the emperorsstaff could not allbe trusted, Kangxi

developed a secure wayof passing messages tohis reliable officialswho worked in otherparts of the country.Hed put the messagein a box, lock it, and

then send it with themessenger. The officialhad the only other keyfor that box, so Kangxiknew no one else would

read the message.

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would have died for sure. But his mis-sionary friends gave him quinine,which cured him. Unfortunately, thepope of the Christian church wasnt

as open-minded as Kangxi, and hedeclared it unholy for anyone topractice Chinese traditions. Kangxiresponded by asking the missionariesto leave China.

Kangxi loved language. When hewas a boy, he memorized all the impor-

tant Chinese texts, and as a father, he made his sons study them too.As a ruler, hed already asked the Ming followers to compile a historyof the dynasty, but he wanted people to be working on other books aswell. He hired a committee to write a Chinese dictionary. In Chinese,words are represented by symbolscalled charactersinstead of com-binations of letters. Te dictionary the committee created for Kangxiinclude forty-seven thousand characters! Only about a fourth of those

are used today, but that dictionary was used for about two hundredyears. Kangxi also focused on literature. He hired another committeeto compile the Quantangshi, an anthology of more than fifty thousandpoems by 2,200 authors. New editions of this book are still being pub-lished today.

Kangxi was the firstChinese emperor to

play the piano. Pianos

had been part of onlyWestern culture before,but Kangxi thoughtthey were beautiful.

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HOW WILLYOUROCK THE WORLD?I want to be a photographer for a nature magazine. I would like to take really

interesting pictures of misunderstood or feared species and write articles about

why we should respect them like any other animal. My role in this would be to

provide the knowledge it takes to convince people to stop fearing strange animals

and to start to know just how beautiful they truly are. Whether theyre winged orclawed, scaled or finned, they are all wonderful, fascinating forms of life and need

to be recognized as their true selves, not as monsters or nightmares, but as fellow

creatures that can amaze us if we just take the time to discover them.

CAMERONLIVERMOREYAGE 12f


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