Lloyd Lofthouse

Tilly, in claim six, ever the historian as she says in her Readers Cafe review of The Concubine Saga, points out that the Santai Dynasty mentioned in chapter four was not the oldest known dynasty when in fact the oldest was the Xia.

She is correct but wrong at the same time.  The Xia (or “Hsia” as Lin Yutang (1895 – 1976) spells it in his book, My Country and My People) is the oldest known dynasty but was considered along with the Shang and Chou Dynasties as the “Santai” or “Three Dynasties” (2205 B.C. to 222 B.C.).  Lin Yutang mentions this on page 365 of the 1938 hardcover edition, and I have a copy of Lin Yutang’s book in front of me as I’m writing this post.

I suspect Lin Yutang knew more about Chinese history than Tilly or me.

You see, I did a lot of research between 1999 and 2008 using real books and magazines printed on paper in addition to Google searches.  If I mention a historical fact such as the Santai, you can bet that I was referring to one of my research sources—either a tree book or from the Internet.

However, since Tilly couldn’t find any mention of the Santai Dynasty with a quick Google search, I had to be wrong and the Santai Dynasty never existed.

At the time I was starting My Splendid Concubine, the first novel in The Concubine Saga, my wife was finishing the Empress Orchid that would go on to become a finalist for the British Book Awards, a national best seller in the US and the UK and end up translated into twenty-six languages.  The hardcover of Empress Orchid was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2004 and editors fact checked the novel.  The same sources my wife used regarding the average number of young boys that were castrated and became eunuchs and the methods of castration came from the same tree printed sources I used.

It has been eight years since the release of Empress Orchid and not one historian (Chinese or Western) has accused her of historical innacurracy as Tilly did in her review of my novel posted by the Readers Cafe.

This leads me to Tilly’s last claim of historical inaccuracy, number seven, that there was no way that Robert Hart did not know about the Taping Rebellion before the summer of 1855.

Continued on July 13, 2012 in The Self-Annihilation of Credibility – Part 6 or return to Part 4

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Lloyd Lofthouse, a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, is the award winning author of The Concubine Saga.

His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.

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