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Originally Posted by tom hyle
This is similar to Ariel's concern about the Chinese making reproduction swords from other cultures, yes? To me, in a way, it's no big deal, because I am interested in swords; and it is not oldness or some impossible ideal of cultural purity, BTW, that defines a real sword, but whether it is a real sword for really using as a sword. I've seen some real crap out of China, but then I've seen quite a lot of good metalwork, too, and I've seen crap from almost everywhere (Germany, believe it or not). Of course, what is a real cultural object is a quite seperable matter. Viewed from the perspective of the sword as a living art form, the problems of removing styles from their native cultures and of mass production are huge, but we're fighting the whole drive of the overculture to internationalize, to economize, and to standardize everything. It's a steep wall to climb there; I climb it in my own way; I salute you for standing at the bottom of it and trying to figure out where you're gonna grab on.
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Hi Tom,
Actually I am convinced that the region of Long Quan was the craddle to Chinese steel swords.
It would be of great interest to study Chinese swords, not in books but in physical terms, for the jia-gang (sandwiched steel) and other forms existed in China.
Why it has not been kept so alive is something I am still to understand in depth.
However I may found a natural-cultural reason. The Chinese were not expansionists by nature.Their concept of Zhong Guo (The Middle Kingdom) was much more important. Only the Yuan Dynasty and Qin (Ching) Dynasty were respectively Mongol and Manchu, perhaps a reason that the self enclosure did not rely on any paramount legend about the sword.
Overculture, on another aspect of your post, seems to be unstoppable. Uniformization is the word of the day which carries benefits, if we see it as a way (not being carried out) to redistribute wealth to the less developped countries (which is more utopic then doable in a willing way).
But it does have these lost things. The issue in the end is that the overculture is so full of its political righteousness that it is like a tsunami...
