A distorting mirror

There is an old proverb in China: history is a mirror to caution nowadays people’s decision. This is a classic saying which reminds people to use history as a model to improve our movement, but what if the history is a distorting mirror? How can we distinguish the truth from the disguise mask? History is recorded by human beings, which makes it full of tricks. Even the most professional historians can’t promise that what they wrote down was neutral because of the natural emotional judgments. In China, history always has two types: authentic history and unofficial history. The first style was usually recorded by officers who worked for emperors. Therefore, this kind history usually tended to focusing on the contributions that the king made. On the contrary, unofficial history was more incline to reflect the opinions of ordinary people. Moreover, the winners often possessed the power to write the history, so this style of history just took the bright side of the winner, plus the negative side of the loser. For example, in Chinese history, there were two famous men: Liu and Xiang. They had fought for several years to try to beat each other and become China’s emperor. In the end, Liu won the battle; thus, in a lot Chinese authentic historical recording, Liu was an brilliant emperor, but Xiang was just a strong guy who was selfish and didn’t know how to use his mind and soldiers. However, in other unofficial historical books and later historians’ demonstration, Xiang, who made some fatal mistakes which led his loss, was a real man that gained a lot respect from different fields. The illustration in the history of Xiang and Liu would totally different if Xiang win the final battle. Finally, this coming Monday has a special celebration--Columbus Day, which is a holiday to commemorate the landing on America of Columbus. This is a good chance for us to observe deeply of that period of history again to figure out what the distorting mirror really want to tell and teach us.